Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10 Benchmarks

Last week we published Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 benchmarks from a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 and had found Ubuntu's performance degraded peculiarly over the past year and a half. We then published Fedora 7 to 10 benchmarks covering the same time-frame and from the same exact Intel notebook computer, but the newer releases of Fedora were only marginally slower in a few tests. In our performance exploration of Ubuntu we now have additional tests to publish this morning. This time around we're switching out the hardware we're testing on to Intel's newer Core 2 series and we're comparing the performance of the x86 and x86_64 editions of Ubuntu 8.10 against Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5 operating system.

For this testing we had used an Apple Mac Mini with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 clocked at 1.83GHz, its motherboard uses the Intel Mobile 945 + ICH7-M with integrated graphics, 1GB of DDR2 memory, and has an 80GB Hitachi HTS542580K9SA00 HDD. For our Mac OS X "Leopard" testing we had used version 10.5.5, which has the 9.5.0 kernel, X.Org 1.3.0-apple22, a reported OpenGL string of 1.2 APPLE-1.5.30, GCC 4.0.1, and uses a Journaled HFS+ file-system. We had used Apple's BootCamp to install Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex" on the Mac Mini. Both the x86 and x86_64 editions of Ubuntu 8.10 use the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, X Server 1.5.2, OpenGL 1.4 Mesa 7.2, the xf86-video-intel 2.4.1 driver, GCC 4.3.2, and an EXT3 file-system. As Java was used in some of our benchmarks, Mac OS X 10.5.5 provides an official build of Java 1.5.0 while Ubuntu 8.10 was using Java 1.6 through IcedTea 1.3.1. Each operating system was left in its stock configuration and in the stock Phoronix Test Suite configuration, which includes running each test multiple times, etc. Compiz was disabled during the Ubuntu Linux testing.

For comparing the performance of Mac OS X "Leopard" and Ubuntu "Intrepid Ibex" we had used the Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 "Orkdal" release. The Phoronix Test Suite supports benchmarking across Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, and Mac OS X operating systems. This release codenamed Orkdal occurred just earlier in the week and includes a number of enhancements to this GPLv3 licensed software. The tests we used were derived from the Darwin test suite and consisted of Nexuiz, Urban Terror, LAME MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, FFmpeg, timed PHP compilation, timed ImageMagick compilation, timed 7-Zip compression, timed Gzip compression, Bonnie++, GnuPG, BYTE Unix Benchmark, SQLite, Tandem XML, Sunflow Rendering System, Bork File Encrypter, and Java SciMark.