Updated Linux Stack Yields Minor Gains For Intel's Bay Trail NUC

While yesterday's Linux testing at Phoronix revealed Intel Bay Trail graphics are slower than Windows when running in comparison the updated open-source Intel Linux graphics stack, at least the Bay Trail performance for Intel's N2820 NUC has improved in the past few months under Linux.

The Bay Trail NUC was introduced earlier this year and when testing it out with the latest Linux code at the time, the Intel NUC DN2820FYKH was running well on Linux. Fortunately, it's running even better now with the more recent Linux updates.

For reference purposes, I've done some new benchmarks on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64 from the Bay Trail NUC when upgrading to the Linux 3.15 Git kernel and Mesa 10.3-devel plus the Oibaf PPA. This is in contrast to the original Bay Trail NUC testing with Ubuntu 13.10 using the Linux 3.14 kernel and Mesa 10.2-devel. All of the hardware settings (the CPU frequency differences on the below table come down just due to the P-State driver reporting differences between the two kernels) and other configurations along with the packages from the respective distributions were maintained the same.

All benchmarking was carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite.