Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux

As I alluded to recently, the second round of Windows 7 vs. Linux benchmarks -- with the first round consisting of Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04 and Mac OS X vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu benchmarks -- are currently being done atop a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook that is quite popular with business professionals. With the high-end ThinkPad W510 boasting a dual quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU with Hyper-Threading plus a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor, we began this second round of cross-platform benchmarks by running a set of workstation tests. In this article we are mainly looking at the workstation graphics (via SPECViewPerf) performance along with some CPU/disk tests.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=15171

[RealNC]

The disk IO bench is the most interesting one. It's the perfect example of why having more throughput is not better; Linux does it faster, but the whole system locks up while doing IO. Windows is slower, but the system stays fluid while the operation is executing.

No benchmark ever done by Phoronix shows that.

[Love4Boobies]

Hi.

I just registered to say that the article is dead wrong. IOzone needs Cygwin under Windows (it uses mmap() and pthreads), which is an emulation layer. Benchmarks should never be done with emulation of any sort.

Try running a file system benchmarking software that's native to Windows. Use Wine under Linux and see what happens...

Cheers,
Bogdan

[NomadDemon]

only 2 syntethic tests.. fail....
why dont test Enemy Territory ?
gimp, audacity, openoffice, vlc, compressing stuff?

[EarthMind]

Why always Ubuntu? It'd be nice to see real Enterprise Linux compared to Win 7 results. Red Hat EL and Novell EL.

[Tgui]

Good article. Possible emulation issues aside affecting performance, I'm not surprised both operating systems were so very close in performance. MS has done a nice job (better job?) engineering this release of their OS. Though I'm mainly a Linux guy, I can say "Good JERB MS!". I've even gone as far as dual booting Win 7. My first MS OS since Win2k.

[Kirurgs]

I agree with boobies
And I'm looking forward to see some AMD benchmarks as well!

[Enrox]

Not only did Ubuntu 10.04 LTS do a great job over Microsoft Windows 7 with the disk tests, but also when looking at the raw CPU performance of the Intel Core i7 720QM using OpenSSL with RSA 4096-bit encryption the performance
of Ubuntu Lucid was more than doubled when compared to Windows 7 Professional.

That doesn't make any sense. In a CPU bound test the OS can't in any way effect the results by such a margin.
Your test has some major issue, fix it before publishing misleading results

[kraftman]

The disk IO bench is the most interesting one. It's the perfect example of why having more throughput is not better; Linux does it faster, but the whole system locks up while doing IO. Windows is slower, but the system stays fluid while the operation is executing.

No benchmark ever done by Phoronix shows that.

I think you're wrong. Here's the issue probably and finally, it seems to be fixed soon:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/8/1/40

[kraftman]

That doesn't make any sense. In a CPU bound test the OS can't in any way effect the results by such a margin.
Your test has some major issue, fix it before publishing misleading results

Why it can't? Search for OS X benchmarks and you'll see Linux also outperformed it in this test.

@Love4Boobies

Try running a file system benchmarking software that's native to Windows. Use Wine under Linux and see what happens...

+1. Btw. I'd like to see what happens.