macOS 10.13 vs. Windows 10 vs. Clear/Fedora/openSUSE/Ubuntu Linux Benchmarks
When running tests this week on a MacBook Pro for the Dota 2 Vulkan/OpenGL cross-OS performance I also took the opportunity as part of the fun benchmarking week for celebrating the Phoronix 14th birthday by running a broader set of system benchmarks across the latest macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Windows 10 Pro, and various Linux distributions. Here are those CPU/system performance benchmark results.
This operating system benchmarking happened on an Apple Mac-A5C67F76ED83108C, the 15-inch late 2016 MacBook Pro model with Touch Bar. The MacBook Pro is equipped with an Intel Core i7 6700HQ Skylake CPU that is quad-core / eight threads with a 2.6GHz base frequency and 3.5GHz boost frequency, 16GB of RAM, 250GB Apple SM0256L SSD, and Radeon Pro 450 graphics with 2880 x 1800 panel. This same hardware in the same configuration was used across all of the operating system benchmarks for this comparison.
The tested operating systems included:
- MacOS 10.13.4 as the latest at the time of testing with Apple LLVM 9.1.0 and the now default APFS file-system.
- Windows 10 Pro as of build 17134 with an NTFS file-system.
- Windows 10 Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) using Ubuntu 18.04 on the above-mentioned Windows 10 configuration.
- Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the Linux 4.15 kernel, GCC 7.3.0, and an EXT4 file-system.
- Clear Linux 22780 with the Linux 4.16 kernel, GCC 8.1.1, and EXT4.
- Fedora Workstation 28 with updates is the Linux 4.16 kernel, GCC 8.1.1, and EXT4.
- OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with the Linux 4.16 kernel, GCC 7.3.1, and its default file-system configuration of Btrfs root file-system with XFS home partition.
Arch-based Antergos and Manjaro were also attempted for testing on this MacBook Pro, but both distributions failed to install. Overall though a nice look at Windows and macOS up against several Linux distributions. In case you missed it from just over a week ago, there was also a 15-way Linux distribution comparison against Windows 10 on some more powerful (non-Apple) hardware.
All of these macOS and Linux benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.