Benchmarks Archive

GCC 4.6, LLVM/Clang 2.9, DragonEgg Benchmarks

Guest post by Michael 2011-03-29 Benchmarks 10 Comments

"Version 4.6 of GCC was released over the weekend with a multitude of improvements and version 2.9 of the Low-Level Virtual Machine is due out in early April with its share of improvements. How though do these two leading open-source compilers compare? In this article we are providing benchmarks of GCC 4.5.2, GCC 4.6.0, DragonEgg with LLVM 2.9, and Clang with LLVM 2.9 across five distinct AMD/Intel systems to see how the compiler performance compares."

Guest post by Brooss 2011-03-23 Benchmarks 44 Comments

A new set of x264 and vpxenc encoder benchmarks have been published. The new benchmarks address many of the concerns raised in the comments about the methodology used in the previous article, such as using SSIM for quality measurement. Theora is also included in these tests.

Guest post by Brooss 2011-03-15 Benchmarks 71 Comments

A comment on the recent article about the Bali release of Googles WebM tools (libvpx) claimed that one of the biggest problems facing the adoption of WebM video was the slow speed of the encoder as compared to x264. This article sets out to benchmark the encoder against x264 to see if this is indeed true and if so, how significant the speed difference really is.

Compiler Benchmarks of GCC, LLVM-GCC, DragonEgg, Clang

Submitted by Michael 2010-11-08 Benchmarks 24 Comments

"LLVM 2.8 was released last month with the Clang compiler having feature-complete C++ support, enhancements to the DragonEgg GCC plug-in, a near feature-complete alternative to libstdc++, a drop-in system assembler, ARM code-generation improvements, and many other changes. With there being great interest in the Low-Level Virtual Machine, we have conducted a large LLVM-focused compiler comparison at Phoronix of GCC with versions 4.2.1 through 4.6-20101030, GCC 4.5.1 using the DragonEgg 2.8 plug-in, LLVM-GCC with LLVM 2.8 and GCC 4.2, and lastly with Clang on LLVM 2.8."

Submitted by lemur2 2010-08-03 Benchmarks 36 Comments

Here is the continuation of a series of comparison tests that is without doubt bound to cause a huge amount of controversy: Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux There are performance wins and losses on both sides of the fence, but Ubuntu compares very well with Windows 7, and no doubt these tests indicate a much closer performance comparison than most people would have expected.

Submitted by Oliver 2010-07-26 Benchmarks 7 Comments

Blogger Kevin Bowling takes a look at the never-ending stream of benchmarks from Phoronix, with various Linux distros pitted against each other and even different operating systems, and he wonders, are they bullshit? . Case in point, this Debian vs FreeBSD benchmark that was submitted to OSNews yesterday.

First Look: VP8 vs. H264

Thom Holwerda 2010-05-23 Benchmarks 99 Comments

Now that Google has opened up VP8, the big question is obviously how it'll hold up to H264. Of course, VP8 already wins by default because it's open source and royalty free, but that doesn't mean we should neglect the quality issue. Jan Ozer from StreamingMedia.com has put up an article comparing the two codecs, and concludes that the differences are negligible - in fact, only in some high-motion videos did H264 win out. As always, this is just one comparison and most certainly anything but conclusive. Update: Another comparison. I can't spot the difference, but then again, I'm no expert.

Comparing Flash, HTML5 Performance

Thom Holwerda 2010-03-11 Benchmarks 67 Comments

Common wisdom has it that Flash is a resource hog, and that HTML5 will prevent your processor from having to work really, really hard to show animations of videos. Well, a number of people have conducted benchmarks with the latest browsers and Flash betas, and common wisdom is starting to show serious signs of crackage.

FreeBSD 8.0, Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

Submitted by Michael 2009-09-28 Benchmarks 28 Comments

Phoronix was kind enough to add a deliciously lengthy nine-page compare and contrast between FreeBSD 8 and Ubuntu 9.10 to their arsenal of articles. "Canonical will be releasing Ubuntu 9.10 at the end of next month while the final release of FreeBSD 8.0 is also expected within the next few weeks. With these two popular free software operating systems both having major updates coming out at around the same time, we decided it warranted some early benchmarking as we see how the FreeBSD 8.0 and Ubuntu 9.10 performance compares. For looking more at the FreeBSD performance we also have included test results from FreeBSD 7.2, the current stable release. In this article are mostly the server and workstation oriented benchmarks with the testing being carried out on a dual AMD Opteron quad-core workstation."

Benchmarks: AmigaOS 4.1 vs. MorphOS 2.3

Submitted by David Brunet 2009-08-11 Benchmarks 28 Comments

With OSNews really diving into the world of the Amiga as of late, with a review of AmigaOS 4.1 on ACube's sam440ep and an upcoming review of MorphOS 2.3 on an Efika, it was kind of coincidental that we have a set of benchmarks comparing MorphOS 2.3 and AmigaOS 4.1 to one another, both running on the Pegasos II machine.

Open Source Search Engine Benchmarks

Submitted by Sean Fargo 2009-07-06 Benchmarks No Comments

An interesting article, this details the experiments and procedures Vik Singh performed to test the latest versions of several open source search engines, particularly Lucene, Xapian, zettair, sqlite, and sphinx. It tests them by indexing Twitter results in varied categories as well as the amount and relevancy of medical journals for a certain query, providing comparative system stats and relevancy scores. All of the benchmark code is open source as well.

Ext4, Btrfs, NILFS2 Performance Benchmarks

Submitted by Dacha 2009-06-29 Benchmarks 14 Comments

"The past few Linux kernel releases have brought a number of new file-systems to the Linux world, such as with EXT4 having been stabilized in the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, Btrfs being merged into Linux 2.6.29, and most recently the NILFS2 file-system premiering with the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. Other file-systems have been introduced too during the past few Linux kernel release cycles, but these three have been the most talked about and are often looked at as being the next-generation Linux file-systems. Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. We also looked at how these file-systems compared to EXT3 and XFS."

Compare and Contrast: Ubuntu 9.04, Mac OS X 10.5.6

weildish 2009-05-13 Benchmarks 68 Comments

Phoronix, known for their various speed tests and reviews, compared the latest in Ubuntu and what, until recently, used to be the lastest in Mac OS X with 29 different benchmarking tests. Some of the results were rather interesting.

Sun Studio 12 vs. GCC3 vs. GCC4 Benchmarks

Submitted by Michael 2009-02-20 Benchmarks 15 Comments

"Earlier this month we published an article looking at the Linux versus OpenSolaris performance when using the new AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs. Ubuntu Linux was faster than OpenSolaris 2008.11 in nearly all of the tests, but as mentioned in that article, OpenSolaris is still dependent upon GCC 3.4 where as Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions are now shipping with the newer and much-improved GCC 4 series. Following that article being published, Sun Microsystems had requested some compiler tests since they were confident the results would be different had their Sun Studio compiler been used. Well, in this article we now have some OpenSolaris benchmarks from the same AMD setup using GCC 3.4, GCC 4.0, and Sun Studio 12."

AMD Shanghai Opteron: Linux vs. OpenSolaris Benchmarks

Submitted by Michael 2009-02-09 Benchmarks 20 Comments

"In January we published a review of the AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs on Linux- when we looked at four of the Opteron 2384 models. The performance of these 45nm quad-core workstation/server processors were great when compared to the earlier AMD Barcelona processors on Ubuntu Linux, but how is their performance when running Sun's OpenSolaris operating system? Up for viewing today are dual AMD Shanghai benchmarks when running OpenSolaris 2008.11, Ubuntu 8.10, and a daily build of the forthcoming Ubuntu 9.04 release."

Submitted by M-Saunders 2009-02-04 Benchmarks 24 Comments

So Windows 7 is supposed to be screaming fast, right? Anecdotal accounts report it booting quicker and feeling snappier than Vista, but the proof is in stats. TuxRadar has benchmarked Windows 7 against Vista and Ubuntu Linux, comparing install time, disk space usage, boot speeds and filesystem performance. The graphs also show how the sparkly ext4 filesystem compares against its older brother.

Java Performance: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

Submitted by Michael 2008-12-19 Benchmarks 45 Comments

From Phoronix: "Have you ever wondered on what operating system Java works the best? While by no means is it a conclusive multi-platform comparison, for this article we ran a number of Java benchmarks on both Windows Vista Premium and Ubuntu Linux to see how the Java Virtual Machine performance differs. In addition, when running Ubuntu we had tested Sun's official Java package as well as the OpenJDK alternative."

Inside Tsubame: Japan’s NVIDIA GPU Supercomputer

Submitted by caffeine deprived 2008-12-11 Benchmarks 14 Comments

Japan's Tsubame supercomputer was ranked 29th-fastest in the world in the latest Top 500 ranking with a speed of 77.48T Flops (floating point operations per second) on the industry-standard Linpack benchmark. Why is it so special? It uses NVIDIA GPUs. Tsubame includes hundreds of graphics processors of the same type used in consumer PCs, working alongside CPUs in a mixed environment that some say is a model for future supercomputers serving disciplines like material chemistry.

Real World Benchmarks of the ext4 File System

Submitted by Michael 2008-12-03 Benchmarks 18 Comments

The choice of filesystems on Linux is vast, but most people will stick with their respective distributions' default choices, which will most likely be ext3, but you're free to use ReiserFS, XFS, or something else completely if you so desire. Things are about to change though, with btrfs just around the corner. To bridge the gap between now and btfrs, ext3 has been updated to ext4, which adds some interesting features like extents, which are already in use in most other popular file systems. Phoronix decided it was time to do some performance checking on ext4.

Benchmarks: Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10

Thom Holwerda 2008-11-06 Benchmarks 24 Comments

Phoronix compared the performance figures of Mac OS X 10.5.5 with those of Ubuntu 8.10. They conclude: "Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5 Leopard had strong performance leads over Canonical's Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex in the OpenGL performance with the integrated Intel graphics, disk benchmarking, and SQLite database in particular. Ubuntu on the other hand was leading in the compilation and BYTE Unix Benchmark. In the audio/video encoding and PHP XML tests the margins were smaller and no definitive leader had emerged. With the Java environment, Sunflow and Bork were faster in Mac OS X, but the Intrepid Ibex in SciMark 2 attacked the Leopard. These results though were all from an Apple Mac Mini."