openSUSE 13.1 Shows Off Nice Performance Improvements

If you haven't yet upgraded from openSUSE 12.3 to the openSUSE 13.1 release that greeted the world this week, for many users there will be performance improvements to find with this major Linux distribution update. Here's some benchmarks showing off some of the performance improvements.

OpenSUSE 12.3 was released back in March atop the Linux 3.7 kernel, KDE 4.10, and the GCC 4.7 compiler release. For those using the open-source Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau graphics, Mesa 9.0 was at play. Meanwhile with the openSUSE 13.1 release that took place on Tuesday there is the Linux 3.11 kernel, KDE 4.11.2, GCC 4.8.2, and for the open-source graphics drivers there is Mesa 9.2.2.

If you pay attention to the frequent Phoronix articles, you will know there's been a heck of a lot of improvements made between Linux 3.7 and 3.11, GCC 4.7 to 4.8, and Mesa 9.0 to 9.2. If you aren't familiar with all of the changes in this span of less than one year, you really need to read more Phoronix and do your due diligence; here's the news archives and article archives.

To put out some openSUSE 13.1 benchmarks, on Wednesday I did clean installs of openSUSE 12.3 and openSUSE 13.1 x86_64 from an Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge Extreme Edition system. The system was with the Intel Core i7 4960X CPU, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, 320GB Seagate HDD, and ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics. The openSUSE x86_64 KDE flavor was compared both times with its stock settings. All benchmarks for this quick but straightforward comparison were delivered via the Phoronix Test Suite.