Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS vs. 8.10 Alpha 2 Performance

With Canonical having pulled many new packages into Ubuntu 8.10 from Debian unstable and there being the Linux 2.6.26-rc8 kernel, a near-final version of X.Org 7.4 / Mesa 7.1, and GCC 4.3 among them, we've decided to run a few early benchmarks of Intrepid Ibex. In this article we have enclosed 32 benchmark results from the Phoronix Test Suite comparing Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS to Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 2.

Using the Phoronix Test Suite 1.0.3 release we had run the universe-cli suite. This suite includes benchmarks for audio encoding, video encoding, compilation, compression, disk, cryptography, database, memory, and Java tests, among others. The complete list of tests used include APE encoding, FLAC encoding, MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, WavPack encoding, ffmpeg video encoding, mencoder video encoding, Apache compilation, ImageMagick compilation, Linux kernel compilation, PHP compilation, 7zip compression, gzip compression, lzma compression, pbzip2 compression, eSpeak, GnuPG, OpenSSL, Super PI, SQLite, pts_Graph, BYTE UNIX Benchmarks, SciMark 2, RAMspeed, Memory Bandwidth, tandem_Xml, Java SciMark 2, and Sunflow Rendering System. In this testing we aren't focusing upon any of the graphics benchmarks contained within the Phoronix Test Suite, but later on in the Ubuntu 8.10 development cycle we will be performing another round of testing that will include such tests.

Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS ships with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel, X.Org 7.3, GNOME 2.22, GCC 4.2.3 are among the major packages. Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 2 shipped with the Linux 2.6.26-rc8 kernel, X Server 1.5.0 RC5 / X.Org 7.4, GNOME 2.23 unstable, and GCC 4.3.1.

The test system we used for this article was a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 laptop with an Intel Core Duo T2400 (1.83GHz) processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, 80GB SATA HDD, and ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 128MB.