Ubuntu 13.04 Linux Can Outperform Apple OS X 10.8.3

OS X 10.8.3 with Xcode had some performance wins over Ubuntu Linux with GCC in some of the open-source computational benchmarks.

In the OpenMP benchmarks, of course the modern GNU Compiler Collection does better than the OpenMP-less LLVM stack.

For some tests, the OS doesn't get in the way too much,

GCC 4.7.2 is fairing nicely for C-Ray over Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS and OS X 10.8.3.

While these results are just from one Apple MacBook Pro, testing from other Apple systems comparing OS X to Linux distributions will happen in another article on Phoronix. For this MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i5 520M, Ubuntu Linux has matured quite nicely compared to other results in recent years. The open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack has reached a rather nice point (and it's still improving to catch up to the Intel Windows driver), the EXT4 file-system generally runs better than Apple's Journaled HFS+ file-system for disk tests, and the other tests are mixed depending upon the operating system's preferred compiler tool chain and build environment.

Plenty more tests to come this month with the release of Ubuntu 13.04 being just around the corner...