OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 vs. Leap 42.2 vs. Tumbleweed Benchmarks

For those curious how openSUSE Leap 42.2, which was released last week, compares performance-wise to Leap 42.1 and the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed, here are some benchmarks today for your viewing pleasure. Also included with this openSUSE performance comparison was Intel's Clear Linux distribution as an independent metric of a distribution that's generally among the fastest thanks to the aggressive optimizations by default.

From an Intel Core i7 6800K (Broadwell-E) system with MSI X99A WORKSTATION, 16GB DDR4, 120GB Samsung EVO 850, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X graphics, openSUSE 42.1, 42.2, Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux were all compared when carrying out clean, out-of-the-box installations of each Linux OS being tested. The differences reported on the system table come down to e.g. different base vs. turbo frequency being reported depending upon the CPU frequency governor used by that OS, and other minor differences.

As OpenSUSE Leap 42.2 doesn't ship with Nouveau 3D support enabled by default, no graphics tests were carried out but rather focused on looking at the performance in other areas. All of these openSUSE and Clear Linux performance benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.