Ubuntu 10.10 vs. Mac OS X 10.6.5: A Competitive Race

“Back in May, we published benchmarks of Mac OS X 10.6.3 vs.
Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04, along with other times, looking at the
performance of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system relative to Ubuntu
and other Linux distributions. In most of those articles though we
used Mac Mini computers, but now with a new Mac Book Pro in our
labs with the latest Apple/Intel hardware, along with the most
recent versions of each operating system, we have carried out a new
set of tests that is also more in-depth than our earlier published
benchmarks.

“We began our tests of this new Mac Book Pro last week by
starting out with looking at the power consumption between Mac OS X
and Linux where we found that Apple’s operating system generally
consumed less power on their own hardware than with Ubuntu 10.10
and the Linux 2.6.35 kernel, but that isn’t to a huge surprise.
With today’s cross-platform tests, we are looking at the
performance for OpenGL, OpenCL, CPU, and disk performance, among
other areas.

“The Apple Mac-F22586C8 being used boasts an Intel Core i5 520M
processor clocked at 2.40GHz, 4GB of DDR3-1066MHz memory, a 320GB
Hitachi HTS54503 SATA 5400RPM hard drive, and a NVIDIA GeForce GT
330M (GT216) 256MB graphics processor. The Mac OS X 10.6.5 release
was used with its 10.5.0 kernel, X.Org Server 1.4.2-apple56,
Apple’s NVIDIA graphics driver, the Journaled HFS+ file-system, and
Xcode 3.2.5 that provides GCC 4.2.1 and Clang. On the Linux side
was Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” with the Linux
2.6.35-22-generic kernel, X.Org Server 1.9.0, the NVIDIA 260.19.21
display driver providing OpenGL 3.3.0, GCC 4.4.5, GNOME 2.32.0
desktop, and an EXT4 file-system.”

Complete Story