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Ubuntu 8.10 vs. Mac OS X 10.5.5 Benchmarks
An anonymous reader writes "As a sequel to their Is Ubuntu Getting Slower? Phoronix now has out an article that compares the performance of Ubuntu 8.10 to Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5. They tested both the x86 and x86_64 spins of Ubuntu and threw at both operating systems a number of graphics, disk, computational, and Java benchmarks, among others. With the Mac Mini used in some of the comparisons, 'Leopard' was faster, while in others it was a tight battle."
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It's a lengthy read, and there isn't much in there to say that Ubuntu has any real work to do. Seems like they were comparing two Ferrari race cars and commenting on the differences in interiors... to use a car analogy.
I've just upgraded 8 systems to 8.10 and am quite happy. I was concerned over real world issues about the upgrade from early reports. The old IBM T22 with 256MB RAM was my test case. Guess what? The upgrade went as fast as my Wireless G card would allow it, after a reboot, and then an update last night, it is working a bit better than with 8.04 from a layman's point of view. Yes, it can drag now and then, but is resource limited severely. After the upgrade I did not have to tweak anything, and any problems I was having prior are now fixed. I appear to have fscked up a setting on the wireless networking, but now it's all good. As far as I am concerned, with two older laptops upgraded, and 3 older desktops upgraded, all with ZERO defects, Ubuntu continues to impress me. I will continue to give out CDs free to anyone that wants to improve their computing life.
Now, if you just have to have the 'perfect' gaming machine... go ahead and worry about little things. As for the rest of the world, 8.10 is rocking awesomeness.
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Also worth mentioning are the collection of posts from the last thread that convincingly argued various problems with the Phoronix Benchmarks.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Speed tests are good, let's make sure we're doing them right
... for those that can't be bothered to read this lengthy yet information sparse piece.
1. MacOS X is faster in graphics intensive benchmarks.
2. The other benchmarks are fairly even with Ubuntu coming out on top more often than OS X (one notable exception is SQLite).
This is hardly anything new. OS X has a well optimised graphics system with good drivers for the intel chips (which up until now was used in both Macbooks and Mac Minis).
Also SQLite is AFAIK integral to many features of OS X, and for this reason it makes sense for Apple to have optimised for it.
Overall the benchmarks suggests that Linux (not just Ubuntu) needs some work on the graphics system and the Intel drivers. What a shock.
For things like compilations, there's a bunch of file opens, caching the compiler and loader, gobs of Mallocs, and so forth that probably intersect the OS. Then there's the driver and video layer tests that look at frames per second. Leopard had 2 to 4 times faster frames per second. then there's the supporting distro services. Tests of My SQL were 4 times faster on the mac. And then there's things like the optimzation of VMs like JAVA where again Leopard excels. THese are clearly optimization problem and can be improved. the purpose of comparing it against a mac is not simply to say "oh yeah mac is faster than unbuntu", but rather to give a bench that shows how much room for optimization ubuntu has. Conclusion is that in almost every aspect Ubuntu is severely unotimized. Since older Linux seemed to be more optimized it suggests that feature bloat is probably either screwing up the design of linux or no one is paying attention to optimizing those features.
What's up with the SQLite inserts? Is EXT3 really that bad? I would be interested in seeing PostgreSQL benchmarks.
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Ubunu isn't getting slower, Mac OSX is getting faster.
Do any of you recall Mac OSX 10.0?
The day I installed Apple's first "modern" OS, I thought X marked the spot of Apple's demise.
Apple has done an admirable job bringing MacOS into the 21st century, and their future looks promising.
Next year, we will be seeing how much the extreme emphasis Apple is placing on performance will affect comparisons like these. Apple has figured out that since they can no longer hope to use differences in the CPU to differentiate themselves with generic Windows boxen, they will be using Microsoft's extreme backwards compatibility needs against them when it comes to fully using all the cores--whether they be in a CPU or a GPU--in a computer, and making full use of the 64-bit instruction set. GPGPU programming can give a huge performance boost to certain algorithms and the cleaner, more register rich, 64-bit instruction set is intrinsically faster in addition to allowing larger data sets.
That's why they stopped selling non 64-bit capable computers a couple years ago, and why the new MacBooks have much improved integrated graphics. That's why they are moving their developers to include 64-bit compiles as part of newly shipped universal binaries. Next year is when all this latent potential gets switched on.
Linux has the opportunity to do the same; perhaps more opportunity as it has less of a legacy binary issue, although Linux has to deal with a multitude of graphics chips, Apple only has to optimize for a handful.
It came from nothing to something in a very short period of time.
I wouldn't call Debian "nothing".
Mac OS X doesn't have to accommodate variances in the hardware it is running on in the same way that Linux or Windows has to do. Therefore, it can exploit the hardware better. It's the same principle that applied to game developers targeting the XBox rather than a standard PC. Standard PCs might be more powerful, but the XBox is a non-moving target, so you don't need to write to the lowest common denominator, and can exploit the particular strengths of the hardware better. So, it's unreasonable to expect an OS that is written to work on multiple platforms to compete in this fashion.
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I have not noticed performance problems from Ubuntu. Sometimes I think these small differences are pretty much unnoticeable to the common user. I would say that while Linux always seems fast and snappy to me, its Windows which has a truly noticeable sluggish feel.
I certainly do not think it is a good trade off in an OS to sacrifice features for an increase in speed which really is not noticeable. In most cases this is not necessary as many parts of a system can be made optional. The schedular and some core kernel systems effect the speed of the whole system, but most other components are optional, like X, like drivers, like Gnome, and so on.
Which also is the nice thing about X: the designers of X decided not to try to build in a bunch of heavy user interface junk into the X server, ironically which many people criticise. Excluding memory leaks in some drivers not related to X itself, the X protocol and server system is actually very efficient by todays standards and does not use much memory. Most memory usage is in caching and in bad drivers full of crappy code. Therefore you can run our own window manager without carrying a bunch of stuff you wont use. But the eye candy is there if you want it. People should choose how many features and memory or how little they wish to use.
Mac OS X doesn't have to accommodate variances in the hardware it is running on in the same way that Linux or Windows has to do.
It doesn't, huh? You mean like three generations of PowerPC CPUs, a second CPU architecture (x86), all the different flavors of HDDs, DVD drives, video cards, and other installable and peripheral devices you can add third-party, and then just about every bit of hardware Apple has come out with since the G3 processor debuted?
Therefore, it can exploit the hardware better. It's the same principle that applied to game developers targeting the XBox rather than a standard PC. Standard PCs might be more powerful, but the XBox is a non-moving target, so you don't need to write to the lowest common denominator, and can exploit the particular strengths of the hardware better.
Okay. The XBox uses a motherboard. Apple has several models using a variety of motherboard and hardware dating back to who-knows-when that it has to account for. You're comparing a console's static array of hardware to an entire production line. That's hardly the same thing.
Ok, you've expressed how much more variance there is in the Apple product line compared to the XBox. Now, just for the sake of completeness, why don't you express how much more variance in the supported hardware for Ubuntu compared to Apple.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Older Linuxes are built on GCC 3.x or GCC 4.1.x. Since 4.2.x, GCC has produced absolute garbage code when the Gentoo flags are not enabled.
Since most distros don't ship with --funroll-loops -O19 --ZOMG-MAKE-CODE-FAST, almost everyone has experienced a huge code speed drop. Meanwhile, Apple, knowing that all of their x86 machines support SSE2 or better has no qualms doing said incantations and benefiting from the speedups in autovectorization and other areas where the GCC hackers and Apple have been spending time.
This leads us to the conclusion that a) Older Linuxes were better optimized (by the compiler, not the coder), b) Newer Linuxes are able to benefit but... c) Newer Linuxes are not benefiting because of their one-size-fits-all nature.
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It used to, but doesn't any more. Lack of demand.
And incase you're saying that PPC support is more important than the tens of thousands of devices linux supports, think again. I've never had a hardware setup ubuntu hasn't worked with. It can be tricky at times, but my digital camera works straight away, my phone does, my MP3 player, web camera, usb headset, usb/wireless mouse, etc etc etc. The hardware support in linux absolutely vast, and support for non-peripheral hardware is going to be pretty tight.
So yeah, linux supporting everything does mean lowest-common-denominator development, as the grandparent said.
It used to, but doesn't any more. Lack of demand. And incase you're saying that PPC support is more important than the tens of thousands of devices linux supports, think again. I've never had a hardware setup ubuntu hasn't worked with. It can be tricky at times, but my digital camera works straight away, my phone does, my MP3 player, web camera, usb headset, usb/wireless mouse, etc etc etc. The hardware support in linux absolutely vast, and support for non-peripheral hardware is going to be pretty tight. So yeah, linux supporting everything does mean lowest-common-denominator development, as the grandparent said.
It's worth mentioning that G3 support was dropped in Leopard, and that PowerPC support was dropped entirely from the developer version of Snow Leopard.
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7z is actually pretty impressive. I recently converted a bunch of ROMs from 7z to gz for use with mednafen. I don't remember exactly, but the gzipped roms were close to 50% bigger than the 7z. FWIW, 7z uses both LZMA and bzip2 compression as appropriate. The only real reason not to use it, is that you can't expect people to have 7z installed just yet. But bzip2 overcame that obstacle, and 7z should too. This comparison should interest you.
It's also worth noting that the gui windows 7-zip program is the best archive manager I've ever used on that platform. Easy to use, powerful (great context menu entries), supports most existing formats, and is entirely free. There's no reason 7z shouldn't take over the world. But I guess that makes me a loudmouth advocate, huh.
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The Xbox was always sold with the same chipset. There was no need to have interchangable drivers.
OS X Intel has been sold (so far, and at least) on systems with Intel 945GM, 945PM, GM965, GMS965, PM965, 5000X, 5400 and nVidia 9400M system chipsets. That's two (plus one low-power variation) Intel mobile chipsets with Intel integrated graphics, two Intel mobile chipsets with PCI Express x16 graphics, two Intel server/workstation chipsets, and one nVidia integrated mobile chipset. It supports two generations of Intel GPUs (GMA 950 and X3100), at least three generations of GeForce GPUs (7, 8, and 9-series), and at least four generations of Radeon GPUs (X1k, HD2k, HD3k, and HD4k).
There aren't a whole lot of hardware-specific assumptions or optimizations that can be made without making things only work on on that hardware... which is why hardware-specific code is in interchangeable drivers.
Apple can't even assume that every Intel Mac has a 64-bit dual core CPU; the first Intel Macs had Core Solo or Core Duo CPUs. Apple can assume that every Intel CPU will have SSE2 and SSE3, though, so many floating-point operations are performed using SSE instructions instead of the x87 FPU. But software can be compiled to use SSE on any other operating system as well. (SSE3 is featured on nearly all Intel and CPUs.)
They could write code/compiler optimizations that result in faster execution on some CPUs, but they're already supporting the P6 microarchitecture (the original Core Duo was close in design to the Pentium M) and the Core microarchitecture, and Nehalem will be here soon.