Running Fedora 20 On Intel's Core i7 Haswell-E Platform

With the John The Ripper tests, Ubuntu 14.04 with the Linux 3.17 kernel had a slight performance lead over Fedora 20 which may come down to its kernel defaulting to P-State with the performance governor whereas the Fedora 20 kernel was with ACPI CPUFreq Ondemand (the default 3.11 kernel) or P-State powersave (the stable 3.16 update). Fedora 20 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS are both using the GCC 4.8.x compiler by default.

Fedora 20 with its stable updates yielded faster performance for x264 video encoding (likely due to the kernel boost) but the Ubuntu 14.04 configuration was still faster.