From The Atom 330 To Haswell ULT: Intel Linux Performance Benchmarks

For the past month I've been testing out the CompuLab Intense-PC2 and it's been a terrific, small, Linux PC. The Intense-PC2 is packed with a low-power "Haswell ULT" Core i7 4600U processor and for some fresh Linux benchmarks I compared it to the former Sandy Bridge Core i7 3517UE and Intel Bay Trail Celeron N2820 NUC. For making things real interesting, I also ran some new benchmarks on an aging Intel Atom 330 system to show how the Intel low-power performance has been improving in recent years.

The Linux performance benchmarks in this article, which are to complement the CompuLab Intense-PC2 review about to be published on Phoronix, included tests of the:

- MSI MS-7467 NetTop that was equipped with an Intel Atom 330 (1.6GHz dual-core + Hyper Threading), 1GB of RAM, 250GB HDD, and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4350 graphics. It was what was sold as MSI's Wind Box NetTop back in 2010.

- Intel's current-generation Bay Trail NUC with the Celeron N2820 dual-core 1.8GHz SoC, 4GB of RAM, 1TB HGST HDD, and the integrated Ivy Bridge class graphics.

- The original CompuLab Intense-PC with Core i7 3517UE processor (dual-core 2.8GHz plus Hyper Threading), 8GB of RAM, 500GB Hitachi HDD, and Intel HD Graphics 4000.

- The brand new CompuLab Intense-PC2 with Haswell ULT based Core i7 4600U processor running at 3.3GHz in dual-core configuration plus Hyper Threading. This Haswell mini PC had 8GB of RAM, 120GB Micro SSD, and Intel 7260 Wireless.

It's been quite the evolution of mini, Linux-friendly PCs over the past few years. All four of these systems were loaded with the same Ubuntu 14.10 x86_64 development snapshot. This Ubuntu 14.10 snapshot shipped with the Linux 3.16 kernel, Unity 7.3.1, X.Org Server 1.16.0, Mesa 10.3, GCC 4.9.1, and used an EXT4 file-system by default.

All of the benchmarks in this article were carried out by the Phoronix Test Suite. To see how your own Linux PC's performance compares to all of the results about to be shown in this article for these four low-power PCs of varying generations, simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1410085-LI-PC2INSTEN34. It's that easy!