

OS X 10.8 vs. Ubuntu On Apple Hardware, Benchmarked - quicklycode
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple_osx108_ubuntu

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stephencanon
Some of these tests are clearly testing the compiler more than the OS. Looking
over the scimark tests, for example, the FFT, LU, and SOR numbers are (at
least) an order of magnitude too low to be using optimized libraries that are
part of the system. For these benchmarks, we're seeing the compiler quality of
compiler codegen on a reference C implementation (OS tasks like malloc/free
efficiency may have a small effect, but it should be essentially negligible).

No one interested in performance would actually use that code on OS X or
Ubuntu; you would use a tuned library.

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nicholassmith
Like the article title, there is no clear winner but it does look like certain
operations have been optimised on each platform in response to, I'd guess,
expected user needs. Which isn't surprising, but it is interesting seeing what
specifically each OS designer thinks is the expected use that does require
time spent optimising.

Also, quite an in-depth piece of coverage, a lot of benchmarking doesn't take
real world into account and just runs 3DMarks or similar.

~~~
stephencanon
If there are cases important to you as a user, file bug reports about the
performance. OS developers can (and will) guess about what scenarios are most
performance-critical, but feedback from developers and users ("doing X is
important to me, and is slow on your system" / "why is Y slower on your system
than on your competitors" / etc) is enormously valuable and quite welcome. The
squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Speaking as an OS developer, poor performance absolutely is a bug, and your
bug report will be taken seriously.

~~~
nicholassmith
I don't think it's specifically poor performance, but places that have
attracted more optimisation attention. An operating system is a big old chunk
of work, and not every element can be honed to a fine edge. It's good that OS
developers do actually respond and focus on areas users have flagged up as
well, builds better systems.

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frownie
No clear winner...

I'd say there is a winner : Linux. Isn't it interesting that a software
developped by a team of hacker (I'd say a chaotic, huge and ever growing) can
make a monster like Ubuntu and get performances that don't pale against
another OS which is designed by a very organised, super funded, super focused
team of carefully selected programmers...

Ok, I assume a rather romatic view of linux development, but I'd bet I'm not
that far from reality :-)

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SIULHT
Your argument is that Linux is the winner because despite all odds, it doesn't
suck shit as much as you'd expect it to?

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bgilroy26
It's a pretty solid argument if the premises are correct:

The article benchmarks the performance of Ubuntu and OSX, and finds them to be
in a dead heat.

Ubuntu was developed at a lower investment on Canonical's part (OR with a
larger team of less skilled developers, I can't tell which is more important
to frownie).

Therefore Ubuntu represents a greater achievement relative to the resources
invested than OSX does.

~~~
orlandu63
Let's not forget that GNU/Linux is intended to run on any damn machine you
throw at it, while the latest version of OSX is only intended to run on Apple
hardware that is no more than 3 years old. It's amazing that Ubuntu is even
competitive with OSX given these circumstances.

~~~
rytis
Well... Right from the article:

    
    
        Unfortunately, switchable/hybrid graphics remain 
        a pain in the ass under Linux. With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 
        the 2010 MacBook Pro had problems with either 
        open-source driver.

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davidjgraph
What a waste of time, OS X has a usable, stable graphical interface, Ubuntu
doesn't ( a lot of the lack of usability comes from the lack of quality of
third-party apps ). The only use for Ubuntu is as a server, which means
testing things for speed that are server related. And only on a Mini.

And yes, I've tried both Ubuntu 12.04 and OS X 10.8 for several days as my
only work-based machine to road test both properly.

~~~
calinet6
You're going to get flack for that opinion, but you have a point.

The truth is, Unity sucks. A lot. Even after you get used to it. It was a poor
decision by a set of developers out of touch with reality or their user-base,
and it's only beginning to recover and move in the right direction slowly.

Everyone I know is migrating to Mint and Xfce/KDE4/Cinnamon (Gnome 3 fork),
and with good reason.

OSX is still way ahead of the curve, but Linux (not necessarily only Ubuntu)
still has a chance. The idea of Linux is still great: we're hackers, so if you
feel there's a problem, help fix it. Not easy, but the fact that you can is
pretty cool.

~~~
davidjgraph
Oh yeah, the Ubuntu fanboys will be busy. But seriously, I need my main work
machine to _just work_ (TM). I need audio to work without a 4 second lag on
skype (I know that's skype's fault). I need Eclipse to default to fonts that I
don't notice, rather than spending 20 minutes tweaking. I need Teamviewer to
work correctly when I have 2 monitors on Ubuntu.

I know that's off-topic, but I really think everyone/thing Ubuntu related
should be focusing on the fact that the desktop doesn't cut it, the OA is off-
topic if you like. When you write software, you write it first, properly, then
worry about optimization when it's functional (with a few exceptions). If it
doesn't do its job, who cares that it can unzip twice as fast.

~~~
wtetzner
"I really think everyone/thing Ubuntu related should be focusing on the fact
that the desktop doesn't cut it"

So, the problem with this is that what you think is important might not be
what other Ubuntu users think is important.

Also, I've installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my MacBook Pro, and it _just worked_ (TM)
out of the box.

"If it doesn't do its job, who cares that it can unzip twice as fast."

Unless of course you're day to day work involves unzipping large amounts of
data, in which case it ends up being important.

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darkstalker
_The ioquake3-based Urban Terror game was also much faster with Apple's
graphics drivers for the Intel HD Graphics than under Ubuntu Linux with Mesa._

They're comparing apples to oranges. Mesa are like default graphic drivers,
with very little or no hardware acceleration.

~~~
zobzu
that's incorrect. mesa is the 3d graphic library on top of the native intel hd
graphic drivers.

the comparison actually make sense. you're not going to intel's osx drivers
running in linux and you're not going to get mesa and intel's linux drivers
running in osx, you realize that right? right? Oh right it's just trendy to
hit on Phoronix for no reason.

Well, they're testing the same games in the different environments to decide
which environment is the fastest. That's very much apple to apple.

I'd like to hear your test that's so much more accurate between Linux and
Apple gaming with the same hardware. PLEASE ENLIGHTEN US.

~~~
numbsafari
You seem to be really angry about this. I mean, shockingly so.

Your comment just really jumped out at me and caught me by surprise. So much
so that I felt like it might be good for someone to point it out to you.

I'd like to prescribe an afternoon of UrT. Take about 45 minutes to frag the
hell out of a Steve Jobs avatar and post back in the morning. :)

~~~
tedunangst
Anger aside, he's right. mesa is used even if the intel driver is used too.
mesa includes a software implementation, but it's also the gateway to the
hardware drivers.

~~~
ajross
Better stated: the Intel graphics driver is part of the Mesa/DRI2 framework.
Mesa's core provides the OpenGL front end (API implementation, shader
compilers, high level optimizers). Intel provides a low level component that
takes that shader stream and turns it into programs and commands for the
hardware, which is managed by a DRI driver in the kernel.

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cydonian_monk
I haven't yet benchmarked any flavour of Linux running natively on my current-
gen Ivy Bridge 13" MacBook Pro, but I have compared Windows 7 to both System
10.7 and 10.8. Consistently Win7 out performs OS-X on "raw" math-heavy
benchmarks.

I've only uploaded my results form Geekbench-2, but the other benchmarking
utils show similar numbers:

Geekbench-2 Scores and [Results]:

    
    
      OS-X 10.8: 8743 [1]
      Windows 7: 10092 [2]
    

Getting a Linux install to run via Bootcamp on this MBP is one of my next
projects (most likely Gentoo), and I'm curious to see how well its performance
stacks up against the other two. That is taking some time as... well, some
things just don't work yet. (Thankfully I don't have to deal with the hybrid
GPU setup that's in the Retina MBP.)

    
    
      1: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/902437
      2: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/810264

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mcormier
15 pages for this article seems quite excessive

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jpk
Mildly OT, but...

Agreed. Unfortunately, nearly every hardware review like this does that. I
almost invariably skip to the last page to read the conclusion first, and only
poke through the middle pages if I'm curious why the reviewer drew the
conclusion they did.

This one is particularly bad, though, because the pages aren't labeled, and
there's no table of contents. Which makes "poke through the middle pages" for
the purpose of finding a specific test related to the conclusion hard.

We all know it's to bump up the number of page views and therefore ad revenue,
but I wonder: For a review like this, how many ad impressions do you need to
break even on the reviewer's time, hardware cost (if any), and other overhead?
Is ridiculous pagination a necessary evil for these sorts of reviews to exist?
Or is it solely to pad margins?

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Someone
Lots of data, but preciously little information. For example:

\- Why is python so much slower on Mac OS X? if I had to guess, I would say it
is more due to a version difference than due to a compiler change. It might
also be some particularly slow library code on Mac OS X, though.

\- What is causing the sometimes huge differences in CPU-only tasks such as
the matrix computations? Compiler, system overhead due to inefficient code,
system overhead because the system also performs other work (for example, did
the OS index files during some of the runs?), or maybe architectural choices
that lead to system overhead (for example, a scheduler might switch tasks more
often in order to keep UI response low)?

With such info, this would have been a great article. As it stands now, all I
conclude from it is that OpenGL is slower under Ubuntu, and that Linux
filesystems are faster (but there, it would help to know why. HFS probably is
a large part of the explanation, but it also might be that Mac OS ports of
various tools do slightly different things, e.g. By flushing to disk more
aggressively.

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malkia
Things like TLB might also affect your performance, at the cost of memory
fragmentation. For example bigger page size (1, 2 or 4MB) would need only two
2 page directory/table lookups, while 4096 pages would need 3.

It's just one of the examples. For example 4096bytes vs 4MB page size:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:X86_Paging_4K.svg>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:X86_Paging_4M.svg>

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unicornporn
I was just about to try Xubuntu on my MBP, but after seeing those power
consumption stats I don't think I can justify it. Sad but true: Linux worked
better in the old school Desktop era when batteries, power consumption,
sleep/hibernation and wireless networks weren't there to mess things up.

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navpatel
All these benchmarks are great and all... but in terms of using Linux on a
Macbook Pro, the shitty support for the multitouch trackpad/touchpad alone
makes linux barely usable. Unless this has changed recently, in which case
someone please correct me

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donniezazen
Power consumption has been such a big problem on Linux. Their was PCIe-ASPM
bug before and now new power bugs. Their is no end to it.

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indiecore
I'm kind of wondering why you would use a Mac without using OSX. The only
reason to have that computer is to run the OS that ONLY runs on that computer.
Otherwise you can get a better computer for less money that is more flexible.

~~~
antirez
Apple laptops are (IMHO the best, but let's say among) the best in the market.
So it is no surprise that Linux users may want one but without osx.

~~~
gbrindisi
Do you run Linux on a macbook? If yes how is it performing?

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chimeracoder
In case you're not being rhetorical/sarcastic:

Linux (or any other OS) runs terribly on Apple hardware, because the hardware
is intentionally designed to run OS X and only OS X. If you try to run, say,
Ubuntu on a Macbook, you'll notice that you won't be able to do basic things
like adjust the fan speed (it'll be turned up to the max the entire time) and
the battery life will thus be horrible, not to mention that the computer will
also be insanely hot.

This is because of the way an alternate OS is installed on Apple hardware -
it's actually running on top of a low-level layer that prevents the OS from
having proper access to the hardware.

The only time I've ever heard of people running into driver issues these days
on Linux for basic work is on Apple hardware, and that's the reason. So even
if you like Apple hardware, you _still_ wouldn't be getting your money's worth
running any other OS on it.

If you want to run Linux, go for almost any other laptop on the market -
you'll get better priced hardware, _and_ the performance will be better.

~~~
mjg59
"This is because of the way an alternate OS is installed on Apple hardware -
it's actually running on top of a low-level layer that prevents the OS from
having proper access to the hardware."

This is entirely inaccurate. Even using the BIOS CSM ("Boot Camp") gives you
full access to the hardware, and people are moving away from that to native
UEFI booting.

