http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2012, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:31:07 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/25111/Web_Browser_Grand_Prix_VI_Chrome_13_Firefox_6_Mac_OS_X_Lion/ http://www.osnews.com/story/25111/Web_Browser_Grand_Prix_VI_Chrome_13_Firefox_6_Mac_OS_X_Lion/ The latest browser benchmarks are in... again - seems like there's a new one every week. This is one of the best "browser battle" articles though. Chrome 13, Firefox 6, IE9, Opera 11.50, and Safari 5.1 are put through 40-something tests on both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Lion. As a PC guy I was pretty impressed with the performance of Safari on OS X, and the reader feature looks awesome too. The author also uncovered a nasty Catalyst bug that makes IE9 render pages improperly and freeze up under heavy loads of tabs. The tables at the end pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of each browser, which is nicer than a 1-10 or star rating. Good article, and thorough. Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:58:05 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) Benchmarks 30 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Buck Cutburth http://www.osnews.com/story/24975/Test_Driving_GNU_Hurd_with_Benchmarks_Against_Linux/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24975/Test_Driving_GNU_Hurd_with_Benchmarks_Against_Linux/ Phoronix has conducted some preliminary benchmarks, comparing Debian GNU/Hurd to Debian GNU/Linux. "There was only a handful of tests that could be successfully run under Debian GNU/Hurd and in those results the numbers were generally close, though Debian GNU/Linux was running about 4% faster in some and with the MP3 encoding the Linux OS was nearly 20% faster. Debian GNU/Hurd is an interesting project but for now its support is still in shambles, the hardware support is vastly outdated, and there is also no SMP support at this time. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how Debian GNU/Hurd turns out for the 7.0 Wheezy milestone." Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:08:12 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) Benchmarks 14 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Michael http://www.osnews.com/story/24843/C_Clear_Winner_in_Google_Language_Benchmark/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24843/C_Clear_Winner_in_Google_Language_Benchmark/ "Google has released a research paper that suggests C++ is the best-performing programming language in the market. The internet giant implemented a compact algorithm in four languages - C++, Java, Scala and its own programming language Go - and then benchmarked results to find 'factors of difference'." Fri, 10 Jun 2011 22:22:26 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) Benchmarks 99 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News ebasconp http://www.osnews.com/story/24580/GCC_4_6_LLVM_Clang_2_9_DragonEgg_Benchmarks/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24580/GCC_4_6_LLVM_Clang_2_9_DragonEgg_Benchmarks/ "Version 4.6 of GCC was released over the weekend with a multitude of improvements and version 2.9 of the Low-Level Virtual Machine is due out in early April with its share of improvements. How though do these two leading open-source compilers compare? In this article we are providing benchmarks of GCC 4.5.2, GCC 4.6.0, DragonEgg with LLVM 2.9, and Clang with LLVM 2.9 across five distinct AMD/Intel systems to see how the compiler performance compares." Tue, 29 Mar 2011 23:53:58 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) Benchmarks 10 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Michael http://www.osnews.com/story/24564/WebM_H264_Theora_Encoder_Benchmarks/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24564/WebM_H264_Theora_Encoder_Benchmarks/ A new set of x264 and vpxenc encoder benchmarks have been published. The new benchmarks address many of the concerns raised in the comments about the methodology used in the previous article, such as using SSIM for quality measurement. Theora is also included in these tests. Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:14:27 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) Benchmarks 41 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Brooss http://www.osnews.com/story/24528/WebM_H264_Encoder_Speed_Benchmark/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24528/WebM_H264_Encoder_Speed_Benchmark/ A comment on the recent article about the Bali release of Googles WebM tools (libvpx) claimed that one of the biggest problems facing the adoption of WebM video was the slow speed of the encoder as compared to x264. This article sets out to benchmark the encoder against x264 to see if this is indeed true and if so, how significant the speed difference really is. Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:32:20 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) Benchmarks 71 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Brooss http://www.osnews.com/story/24008/Compiler_Benchmarks_of_GCC_LLVM-GCC_DragonEgg_Clang/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24008/Compiler_Benchmarks_of_GCC_LLVM-GCC_DragonEgg_Clang/ "LLVM 2.8 was released last month with the Clang compiler having feature-complete C++ support, enhancements to the DragonEgg GCC plug-in, a near feature-complete alternative to libstdc++, a drop-in system assembler, ARM code-generation improvements, and many other changes. With there being great interest in the Low-Level Virtual Machine, we have conducted a large LLVM-focused compiler comparison at Phoronix of GCC with versions 4.2.1 through 4.6-20101030, GCC 4.5.1 using the DragonEgg 2.8 plug-in, LLVM-GCC with LLVM 2.8 and GCC 4.2, and lastly with Clang on LLVM 2.8." Mon, 08 Nov 2010 22:43:29 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Benchmarks 24 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Michael http://www.osnews.com/story/23642/Workstation_Benchmarks_Windows_7_vs_Ubuntu_Linux/ http://www.osnews.com/story/23642/Workstation_Benchmarks_Windows_7_vs_Ubuntu_Linux/ Here is the continuation of a series of comparison tests that is without doubt bound to cause a huge amount of controversy: Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux There are performance wins and losses on both sides of the fence, but Ubuntu compares very well with Windows 7, and no doubt these tests indicate a much closer performance comparison than most people would have expected. Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:20:40 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) Benchmarks 36 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News lemur2 http://www.osnews.com/story/23599/Phoronix_Benchmarking_Statistically_Significant_/ http://www.osnews.com/story/23599/Phoronix_Benchmarking_Statistically_Significant_/ Blogger Kevin Bowling takes a look at the never-ending stream of benchmarks from Phoronix, with various Linux distros pitted against each other and even different operating systems, and he wonders, are they bullshit? . Case in point, this Debian vs FreeBSD benchmark that was submitted to OSNews yesterday. Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:36:19 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) Benchmarks 7 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Oliver http://www.osnews.com/story/23342/First_Look_VP8_vs_H264/ http://www.osnews.com/story/23342/First_Look_VP8_vs_H264/ Now that Google has opened up VP8, the big question is obviously how it'll hold up to H264. Of course, VP8 already wins by default because it's open source and royalty free, but that doesn't mean we should neglect the quality issue. Jan Ozer from StreamingMedia.com has put up an article comparing the two codecs, and concludes that the differences are negligible - in fact, only in some high-motion videos did H264 win out. As always, this is just one comparison and most certainly anything but conclusive. Update: Another comparison. I can't spot the difference, but then again, I'm no expert. Sun, 23 May 2010 09:41:47 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Benchmarks 99 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22997/Comparing_Flash_HTML5_Performance/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22997/Comparing_Flash_HTML5_Performance/ Common wisdom has it that Flash is a resource hog, and that HTML5 will prevent your processor from having to work really, really hard to show animations of videos. Well, a number of people have conducted benchmarks with the latest browsers and Flash betas, and common wisdom is starting to show serious signs of crackage. Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:59:36 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Benchmarks 67 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22247/FreeBSD_8_0_Ubuntu_9_10_Benchmarks/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22247/FreeBSD_8_0_Ubuntu_9_10_Benchmarks/ Phoronix was kind enough to add a deliciously lengthy nine-page compare and contrast between FreeBSD 8 and Ubuntu 9.10 to their arsenal of articles. "Canonical will be releasing Ubuntu 9.10 at the end of next month while the final release of FreeBSD 8.0 is also expected within the next few weeks. With these two popular free software operating systems both having major updates coming out at around the same time, we decided it warranted some early benchmarking as we see how the FreeBSD 8.0 and Ubuntu 9.10 performance compares. For looking more at the FreeBSD performance we also have included test results from FreeBSD 7.2, the current stable release. In this article are mostly the server and workstation oriented benchmarks with the testing being carried out on a dual AMD Opteron quad-core workstation." Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:21:29 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Jordan Spencer Cunningham) Benchmarks 28 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Michael http://www.osnews.com/story/21977/Benchmarks_AmigaOS_4_1_vs_MorphOS_2_3/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21977/Benchmarks_AmigaOS_4_1_vs_MorphOS_2_3/ With OSNews really diving into the world of the Amiga as of late, with a review of AmigaOS 4.1 on ACube's sam440ep and an upcoming review of MorphOS 2.3 on an Efika, it was kind of coincidental that we have a set of benchmarks comparing MorphOS 2.3 and AmigaOS 4.1 to one another, both running on the Pegasos II machine. Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:41:25 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Benchmarks 28 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News David Brunet http://www.osnews.com/story/21782/Open_Source_Search_Engine_Benchmarks/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21782/Open_Source_Search_Engine_Benchmarks/ An interesting article, this details the experiments and procedures Vik Singh performed to test the latest versions of several open source search engines, particularly Lucene, Xapian, zettair, sqlite, and sphinx. It tests them by indexing Twitter results in varied categories as well as the amount and relevancy of medical journals for a certain query, providing comparative system stats and relevancy scores. All of the benchmark code is open source as well. Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:07:11 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Jordan Spencer Cunningham) Benchmarks 0 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Sean Fargo http://www.osnews.com/story/21742/Ext4_Btrfs_NILFS2_Performance_Benchmarks/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21742/Ext4_Btrfs_NILFS2_Performance_Benchmarks/ "The past few Linux kernel releases have brought a number of new file-systems to the Linux world, such as with EXT4 having been stabilized in the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, Btrfs being merged into Linux 2.6.29, and most recently the NILFS2 file-system premiering with the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. Other file-systems have been introduced too during the past few Linux kernel release cycles, but these three have been the most talked about and are often looked at as being the next-generation Linux file-systems. Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. We also looked at how these file-systems compared to EXT3 and XFS." Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:40:53 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Benchmarks 14 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Dacha