Ubuntu: Faster, But More Power Hungry Than Mac OS X?

When looking at something purely CPU bound rather than GPU focused, Mac OS X continued to go through less energy than Ubuntu 10.10 with its Linux 2.6.35 kernel. Ubuntu 10.10 was consuming 13% more power than Mac OS X 10.6.5 with C-Ray, which is a multi-threaded ray-tracing benchmark.

With the John The Ripper application, Ubuntu continued running faster than Mac OS X, but was going through more power: this time around two Watts more than the Apple OS. Of course, one can argue that Apple has the advantage here since it is their hardware, they only have to support a select number of configurations for their systems, where as Ubuntu and Linux in general has to support a whole spectrum of computers and devices.

Lastly, here is a composite graph looking at the results from idling and then running a number of Phoronix Test Suite test profiles, including the ones listed above. Again, Ubuntu finished most of its tests quicker than Mac OS X, but not without going through significantly more power. Stay tuned for the beginning of more Mac OS X performance tests next week, which goes into much further depth than this brief look at the power consumption.