OS X 10.8 vs. Ubuntu On Apple Hardware, Benchmarked

An anonymous reader writes "OS X 10.8 has been benchmarked against Ubuntu Linux with some interesting results. From the tests on a Apple Mac Mini and Apple MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion was clearly superior when it came to the graphics performance, but the rest of the time the operating systems performed quite closely with no clear winner. OS X also seems to have greater performance issues with solid-state drives than Linux."

Comments

surprise surprise

[shentino]

Apple hardware performs better when run by Apple device drivers.

News at 11.

Re:surprise surprise

[maccodemonkey]

For graphics, what Apple device drivers?

The graphics drivers are written in house at NVidia and AMD. Apple doesn't actually write their own drivers. And the GPUs are just bog standard AMD, NVidia, and Intel GPUs (expect for some of the graphics switching.). There is not reason Linux should be at a disadvantage.

And if they did I'd expect worse performance. Back when Apple used to write their own drivers they were totally awful. Apple has less experience writing graphics drivers, I'm not actually sure why you'd expect Apple written drivers to perform better.

Re:Why is Linux's SSD performance so terrible?

[Hatta]

Linux caches disk reads pretty aggressively. If you have plenty of RAM, you might only notice a difference the first time you start an app.

Re:Why is Linux's SSD performance so terrible?

[0123456]

I made the mistake of "upgrading" two Ubuntu 12.04 desktops to solid state drives, only to find the performance increase was trivial.

If a process isn't disk-intensive, an SSD will make no difference. If it's not seek intensive, a cheap SSD may actually be worse; if I remember correctly, sustained reads from my 'Green' hard drive are 80-100MB per second, whereas one of my SSDs only gets about 40MB per second.

The big benefit is reduced seek time, and a lesser benefit from faster sustained reads on the more modern and/or expensive SSDs. It won't make games run faster unless they're streaming from disk, or improve CPU-intensive 3D rendering, or anything much else that doesn't require a lot of disk seeks.

Re: Why an Intel Mac PC to run linux?

[sl956]

Also I'm kinda curious: Why would spend twice as much to buy an Intel Mac PC if they're just running linux? I'd buy a regular PC for 1/2 to 2/3rd the cost.

I looked for a silent small footprint linux pc. I was unable to find one. That's why I bought a Mac Mini. It runs Linux flawlessly... and silently thanks to the fanless design and SSD.

People wanting an HD screen on a laptop might also have to buy Apple hardware even though they plan to use only Linux.

Re:Why is Linux's SSD performance so terrible?

[Sparticus789]

Defragmenting SSDs is not recommended, as it causes unnecessary use of the storage transistors. The speed associated with a SSD is a result of any block of data being accessible at any time, no hardware movement required.

Wrong interpretation of the results, favors OSX

[tstrunk]

If you read the whole article you will see that there are many computing intensive benchmarks, where Linux outperforms OSX by nearly a factor of two. Saying that there is no noticeable difference is simply wrong (see Page 11, Page 12).

Re:Why is Linux's SSD performance so terrible?

[omnichad]

Hope you mean TRIM and not defragmenting, which occurs when a file is deleted on an SSD, not when one is written. You don't defragment an SSD, as there's no gain at all.

Re: Why an Intel Mac PC to run linux?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

I have the older style Mini and when the HDD goes to sleep and it runs on SSD-only it's damn near completely silent. The fan will only come on when really stressing the cpu.