Intel Tiger Lake Performance Looking Even Better With Ubuntu 21.10

It's been one year now since Intel launched Tiger Lake mobile processors and since then we've been running routine benchmarks of the Core i7 1165G7 on Linux. Tiger Lake at launch was performing well under Linux but its performance has continued evolving nicely since on Linux, especially as it pertains to the Xe Graphics with the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. With Ubuntu 21.10 due out later this month, there is another performance boost to enjoy.

For those with Intel Tiger Lake notebooks contemplating the move to the non-LTS Ubuntu 21.10, there are more performance improvements to note. Similar to Ubuntu 21.10 boosting performance on the AMD/Radeon side, the Intel performance has also matured nicely over the past six months on Linux.

Today's testing is looking at the out-of-the-box performance of Ubuntu 21.04 compared to Ubuntu 21.10 as of this past weekend in its near-final development state. The Dell XPS laptop with Core i7 1165G7 Tiger Lake processor and Xe Graphics GT2 were used for testing. Both Ubuntu Linux releases were cleanly installed and tested in their out-of-the-box configuration.

Most significant with the move from Ubuntu 21.04 to 21.10 is going from Linux 5.11 to Linux 5.13 (sadly not 5.14), Mesa 21.0 to 21.2, and GCC 10.3 to GCC 11.2 as some of the most prominent package upgrades.