Preliminary Tests Of Intel Sandy Bridge & Ivy Bridge vs. Broadwell

All three Intel devices in this article were tested with the same development build of Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64. This build used the Linux 3.18.0-9 kernel, Unity 7.3.1, X.Org Server 1.16.3 RC1, xf86-video-intel 2.99.917, GCC 4.9.2, and Mesa 10.3.2.

The Linux benchmarking on these laptops was handled in a fully automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. First up are a few benchmarks when looking at their performance on battery power while the Phoronix Test Suite was simultaneously monitoring the battery power consumption on a separate thread, followed by rendering the performance-per-Watt for each of the benchmarks. Following these power efficiency tests for the ASUS Zenbook, Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and HP EliteBook were some raw performance tests of the various subsystems while the laptops were running on AC power. The backlights on all of the laptops were maxed out during testing.