Thursday, November 06 2008 @ 02:35 PM EST Contributed by: sde
This time around we're switching out the hardware we're testing on to Intel's newer Core 2 series and we're comparing the performance of the x86 and x86_64 editions of Ubuntu 8.10 against Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5 operating system.
For this testing we had used an Apple Mac Mini with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 clocked at 1.83GHz, its motherboard uses the Intel Mobile 945 + ICH7-M with integrated graphics, 1GB of DDR2 memory, and has an 80GB Hitachi HTS542580K9SA00 HDD. For our Mac OS X "Leopard" testing we had used version 10.5.5, which has the 9.5.0 kernel, X.Org 1.3.0-apple22, a reported OpenGL string of 1.2 APPLE-1.5.30, GCC 4.0.1, and uses a Journaled HFS+ file-system. We had used Apple's BootCamp to install Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex" on the Mac Mini. Both the x86 and x86_64 editions of Ubuntu 8.10 use the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, X Server 1.5.2, OpenGL 1.4 Mesa 7.2, the xf86-video-intel 2.4.1 driver, GCC 4.3.2, and an EXT3 file-system. As Java was used in some of our benchmarks, Mac OS X 10.5.5 provides an official build of Java 1.5.0 while Ubuntu 8.10 was using Java 1.6 through IcedTea 1.3.1. Each operating system was left in its stock configuration and in the stock Phoronix Test Suite configuration, which includes running each test multiple times, etc. Compiz was disabled during the Ubuntu Linux testing.
