Intel Tiger Lake Performance Across Five Autumn 2021 Linux Distributions

Out of 45 different benchmarks, Ubuntu 21.10 followed by Intel's Clear Linux were in first place most often on this Tiger Lake powered Dell XPS notebook.

When taking the geometric mean of all 45 results, Ubuntu 21.10 narrowily ran past Clear Linux and Fedora Workstation 35 Beta to deliver the leading performance. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch Linux were in a distant last place, which as mentioned appears to be due to those distributions not utilizing Intel Thermald by default. Clear Linux meanwhile wasn't as competitive as we are used to seeing out of that Intel performance-first platform, likely due to less room to "stretch its wings" due to thermal/power limitations of the platform. Hopefully this testing shines some light on the matter for those that may not be aware of the impact on newer platforms like Tiger Lake or haven't measured the difference and implications of such. From a different Tiger Lake notebook (i7-1185G7) back over the summer I ran some Thermald investigative benchmarks for those interested.

See all of the autumn 2021 Linux distribution Tiger Lake benchmarks in full via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

Autumn 2021 Linux distribution benchmarks are coming up shortly with an even larger comparison on Intel Ice Lake Xeon, among other tests with the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 and Fedora 35 releases.