Linux 4.0, Linux 4.1 Brings Performance Boosts For Some Intel Low-Power Hardware

For at least some Intel Bay Trail systems, the Linux 4.0 and Linux 4.1 kernels bring measurable performance improvements as shown by this latest round of Phoronix kernel benchmarking.

In my benchmarking of the Intel Compute Stick on Linux over the past few days, I quickly realized that the Linux 4.1 kernel was performing better than its predecessors and that the Linux 4.0 kernel was dramatically better than its predecessors, even Linux 3.19 from Ubuntu 15.04.

Linux 4.0 brought many features across the board and with Linux 4.1 also comes many new features. In terms of what may be driving up the Intel Compute Stick performance under Linux 4.1, Intel tweaked the P-State driver for Bay Trail and Cherry Trail SoCs to offer faster performance with little in the way of increased power usage.

For this article besides showing Intel Compute Stick benchmarks under Linux 3.19, Linux 4.0, and Linux 4.1 Git, I also included results for the Intel Celeron N2820 NUC that's also from the Bay Trail family. All of these kernel benchmarks on the two systems with Ubuntu Linux were run in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.