The Other Issue With Ubuntu 11.10: Boot Speed
Not much has changed in terms of overall compute performance with Ubuntu 11.10. However, some in select hardware configurations may notice some performance improvements. Ubuntu 11.10 is shipping with the GCC 4.6 compiler. When rolling your own code, there are new Intel Core 2 optimizations, initial AVX support, Core i3/i5/i7 optimizations, AMD Bobcat support, and other IA-32/x86-64 and ARM optimizations.