Ubuntu 12.04 To Ubuntu 18.04 Benchmarks On An Intel Laptop

As part of our ongoing benchmarks of the recently released Ubuntu 18.04, here is a look at the performance of Ubuntu Linux on the same laptop while testing all Long-Term Support releases from 12.04 to 18.04 for seeing how the Ubuntu performance has evolved over the past six years on this Intel laptop.

The Intel laptop used for allowing hardware support going back to Ubuntu 12.04.0 was an HP EliteBook powered by an Intel Core i5 Sandy Bridge processor. This particular laptop was considered an "Intel Software Development Platform" and has had good Linux support since the Sandy Bridge roll-out in 2011. Ubuntu 12.04 was as far back as could be tested for Ubuntu LTS releases with the 10.04 Lucid Lynx failing to boot on this laptop.

This HP EliteBook features an Intel Core i5 2520M with two cores / four threads and 2.5GHz base frequency with 3.2GHz turbo frequency, 4GB of RAM, Intel HD 3000 Sandy Bridge graphics, and a 160GB Intel SSD.

The Ubuntu configurations tested were Ubuntu 12.04.0, Ubuntu 14.04.0, Ubuntu 16.04.0, Ubuntu 16.04.0 with all stable release updates (for Spectre/Meltdown mitigation impact), and then Ubuntu 18.04 as of last week.

Each distribution release was tested out-of-the-box with this same laptop using the same hardware; reported differences in the system table such as for the CPU clock speed come down to the ACPI CPUFreq to P-State transition with how the CPU frequency is exposed via sysfs, etc. All of the benchmarks were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite. More benchmarks from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS are on the way on Phoronix.