System76 Gazelle Pro: Ubuntu 13.04 vs. 13.10

System76 recently sent out their Gazelle Professional laptop that's been updated with a mobile Intel Core i7 "Haswell" processor. We're still in the process of fully reviewing this Haswell laptop pre-loaded with Ubuntu 13.04 and comparing it to the range of Intel notebook competition, but for this weekend article are some basic Ubuntu 13.04 vs. Ubuntu 13.10 performance benchmarks.

In our System76 Gazelle Professional review we will have the full run-down on performance and open-source performance benchmarks that put it against a range of other Intel laptops. This article is just a weekend preview that features the updated Ubuntu 13.04 installation as shipped by System76 against the latest Ubuntu 13.10 development packages as of 16 August. It's basically a performance comparison between Ubuntu 13.04 and the current Ubuntu 13.10 development state for a Core i7 4900MQ laptop.

These results should be interesting since it's Haswell-based and I've been advising Phoronix readers since the early June debut of these processors to be pulling the very latest Linux code. For those seeking the best performance, particularly with the Intel HD Graphics found on Haswell, the newer the code the better with regard to Mesa and the Linux kernel.

Ubuntu 13.10 is still heavily under development and not yet past its feature freeze. The Ubuntu 13.10 benchmarks were as of 16 August and still to be pulled into Ubuntu 13.10 is most notably Mesa 9.2 and the controversial Mir display server with XMir support for Unity 7. Mesa 9.2 will definitely further push ahead the Intel Haswell graphics performance as I've shared in other articles, but for the time being using XMir will also pull back the OpenGL graphics performance. Coming up in the next day or two will be some XMir benchmarks from this Gazelle Professional laptop.

The Gazelle Professional that System76 sent over was loaded with an Intel Core i7 4900MQ CPU, Intel HD Graphics, 8GB of DDR3 system memory, and a 120GB Intel SSD.

These Linux performance benchmarks of the System76 laptop with Ubuntu Linux were carried out in a fully automated and reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite software.