

Apple OS X 10.10 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 Performance Test - niutech
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=osx10_ubuntu1410

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teamhappy
GPU drivers have always been a nightmare on OS X, but I didn't know just how
bad they really are. Keep in mind that we're comparing against Mesa drivers
here. Try to imagine what the benchmarks will look like when Valve's Steam
Machines have shipped.

The same is true for HFS+. No real surprises here, even though I didn't know
it was that slow. Most people are probably more interested in ZFS vs. Btrfs
benchmarks.

I would have loved to see some kernel oriented benchmarks like network stack
performance, etc., but then again, performance benchmarks don't really matter
anyway. I'd like OS vendors to focus a bit more on perceived performance. Just
the other day I plugged an external USB HDD into my MacBook Pro and a YouTube
video stopped playing in Chrome (because of some blocking IO call, I presume).
The same happens quite frequently with network IO and freezing UIs.

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krylon
I have to admit I had not given the performance differences between Linux and
OSX much thought, but I am quite surprised. One might think that Apple,
building both the hardware and the operating system should be able to make the
two work together rather well.

(There are of course issues the benchmarks do not measure, specifically
battery life, it would be interesting to see some numbers on that.)

I switched from a 2009 Asus EeeBox running Ubuntu 12.04 to a MacMini with an
i7 about a year ago, and I had planned to install Debian or Ubuntu on it, but
so far I have postponed that. Maybe I should reconsider. There are many things
I have come to like about OSX, but some things I do miss about Linux,
especially the poor integration of XQuartz into the desktop is disappointing.
Cygwin's X Server on Windows integrates into the system a lot more smoothly
than XQuartz does on OSX.

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dcohenp
I'm a bit surprised at the "computational benchmarks" [1] though. Can anyone
confirm these are indeed CPU-bound, and not somehow GPU-assisted? If so, how
can the underlying kernel possibly make such a difference? Scheduling? (if so,
what kind of load was the machine running?) Clearly there must be something
more to it.

[1]
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=osx10_ubu...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=osx10_ubuntu1410&num=4)

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chromakode
Perhaps power management is somewhat to blame here? I would be curious to see
how power consumption compared while running the benchmarks. It's well known
that OSX gets much better battery life than Linux on Apple hardware. I wonder
if the CPU was being throttled to conserve power or thermal output.

~~~
teamhappy
> It's well known that OS X gets much better battery life than Linux on Apple
> hardware.

I couldn't find any information to back that up. Do you have a link to a
benchmark?

I don't think kernels throttle CPUs — CPUs do that themselves already. I could
imagine Apple doing something like OpenBSD in that they favour security over
performance for some operations, but that seems unlikely. IOKit might be to
blame as well, given that it's written in embedded C++ instead of C.

All things considered, I think it's highly likely that, while OS X is quite
shiny on the outside, the underlying OS isn't as modern as some of the others.
Windows and OpenBSD have better security features and now Linux apparently has
better performance.

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dcohenp
Well, but I guess theoretically it could be doing stuff like setting lower
thermal thresholds for throttling. So perhaps not exactly a function of
scheduling, but getting the CPU to make itself slower.

Still, this to me is the most interesting result from that set, and I'd really
love it for someone to dig into it.

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boobsbr
I'm curious to what would be the Windows 8.1 scores to in this test.

