http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:35:07 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 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 http://www.osnews.com/story/21482/Compare_and_Contrast_Ubuntu_9_04_Mac_OS_X_10_5_6/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21482/Compare_and_Contrast_Ubuntu_9_04_Mac_OS_X_10_5_6/ Phoronix, known for their various speed tests and reviews, compared the latest in Ubuntu and what, until recently, used to be the lastest in Mac OS X with 29 different benchmarking tests. Some of the results were rather interesting. Wed, 13 May 2009 01:18:38 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Jordan Spencer Cunningham) Benchmarks 67 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News http://www.osnews.com/story/21012/Sun_Studio_12_vs_GCC3_vs_GCC4_Benchmarks/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21012/Sun_Studio_12_vs_GCC3_vs_GCC4_Benchmarks/ "Earlier this month we published an article looking at the Linux versus OpenSolaris performance when using the new AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs. Ubuntu Linux was faster than OpenSolaris 2008.11 in nearly all of the tests, but as mentioned in that article, OpenSolaris is still dependent upon GCC 3.4 where as Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions are now shipping with the newer and much-improved GCC 4 series. Following that article being published, Sun Microsystems had requested some compiler tests since they were confident the results would be different had their Sun Studio compiler been used. Well, in this article we now have some OpenSolaris benchmarks from the same AMD setup using GCC 3.4, GCC 4.0, and Sun Studio 12." Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:49:19 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Benchmarks 15 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Michael http://www.osnews.com/story/20942/AMD_Shanghai_Opteron_Linux_vs_OpenSolaris_Benchmarks/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20942/AMD_Shanghai_Opteron_Linux_vs_OpenSolaris_Benchmarks/ "In January we published a review of the AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs on Linux- when we looked at four of the Opteron 2384 models. The performance of these 45nm quad-core workstation/server processors were great when compared to the earlier AMD Barcelona processors on Ubuntu Linux, but how is their performance when running Sun's OpenSolaris operating system? Up for viewing today are dual AMD Shanghai benchmarks when running OpenSolaris 2008.11, Ubuntu 8.10, and a daily build of the forthcoming Ubuntu 9.04 release." Mon, 09 Feb 2009 13:24:24 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Benchmarks 20 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Michael http://www.osnews.com/story/20914/Linux_vs_Windows_7_vs_Vista_Benchmarks/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20914/Linux_vs_Windows_7_vs_Vista_Benchmarks/ So Windows 7 is supposed to be screaming fast, right? Anecdotal accounts report it booting quicker and feeling snappier than Vista, but the proof is in stats. TuxRadar has benchmarked Windows 7 against Vista and Ubuntu Linux, comparing install time, disk space usage, boot speeds and filesystem performance. The graphs also show how the sparkly ext4 filesystem compares against its older brother. Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:58:24 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Benchmarks 24 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News M-Saunders http://www.osnews.com/story/20669/Java_Performance_Ubuntu_Linux_vs_Windows_Vista/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20669/Java_Performance_Ubuntu_Linux_vs_Windows_Vista/ From Phoronix: "Have you ever wondered on what operating system Java works the best? While by no means is it a conclusive multi-platform comparison, for this article we ran a number of Java benchmarks on both Windows Vista Premium and Ubuntu Linux to see how the Java Virtual Machine performance differs. In addition, when running Ubuntu we had tested Sun's official Java package as well as the OpenJDK alternative." Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:04:28 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kroc Camen) Benchmarks 45 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Michael http://www.osnews.com/story/20635/Inside_Tsubame_Japan_s_NVIDIA_GPU_Supercomputer/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20635/Inside_Tsubame_Japan_s_NVIDIA_GPU_Supercomputer/ Japan's Tsubame supercomputer was ranked 29th-fastest in the world in the latest Top 500 ranking with a speed of 77.48T Flops (floating point operations per second) on the industry-standard Linpack benchmark. Why is it so special? It uses NVIDIA GPUs. Tsubame includes hundreds of graphics processors of the same type used in consumer PCs, working alongside CPUs in a mixed environment that some say is a model for future supercomputers serving disciplines like material chemistry. Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:18:13 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) Benchmarks 14 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News caffeine deprived http://www.osnews.com/story/20604/Real_World_Benchmarks_of_the_ext4_File_System/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20604/Real_World_Benchmarks_of_the_ext4_File_System/ The choice of filesystems on Linux is vast, but most people will stick with their respective distributions' default choices, which will most likely be ext3, but you're free to use ReiserFS, XFS, or something else completely if you so desire. Things are about to change though, with btrfs just around the corner. To bridge the gap between now and btfrs, ext3 has been updated to ext4, which adds some interesting features like extents, which are already in use in most other popular file systems. Phoronix decided it was time to do some performance checking on ext4. Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:42:31 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Benchmarks 18 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Michael http://www.osnews.com/story/20496/Benchmarks_Mac_OS_X_10_5_vs_Ubuntu_8_10/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20496/Benchmarks_Mac_OS_X_10_5_vs_Ubuntu_8_10/ Phoronix compared the performance figures of Mac OS X 10.5.5 with those of Ubuntu 8.10. They conclude: "Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5 Leopard had strong performance leads over Canonical's Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex in the OpenGL performance with the integrated Intel graphics, disk benchmarking, and SQLite database in particular. Ubuntu on the other hand was leading in the compilation and BYTE Unix Benchmark. In the audio/video encoding and PHP XML tests the margins were smaller and no definitive leader had emerged. With the Java environment, Sunflow and Bork were faster in Mac OS X, but the Intrepid Ibex in SciMark 2 attacked the Leopard. These results though were all from an Apple Mac Mini." Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:29:22 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Benchmarks 23 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News http://www.osnews.com/story/20337/IBM_Transitioning_to_22nm_Chip_Fabrication/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20337/IBM_Transitioning_to_22nm_Chip_Fabrication/ Intel has already shipped 45nm processors, while AMD is trying to get its 45nm to market. TI is claiming big 45nm performance too. Meanwhile, IBM believes it can lead the market to 32 and then 22nm chip production: "At 22nm, the existing techniques for microprocessor manufacturing useful at the 45nm and 32nm nodes will become obsolete. While currently lithography techniques cannot produce 22nm circuitry, IBM has developed a new approach called Computational Scaling, which will allow for this tiny-scale production. The new technique uses advanced mathematical computation to adjust the shape of the masks and illuminating source during etching." Mon, 29 Sep 2008 02:52:12 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) Benchmarks 6 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News Punktyras http://www.osnews.com/story/20098/Benchmarking_Microsoft_Word_From_95_To_2007/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20098/Benchmarking_Microsoft_Word_From_95_To_2007/ Andrew Ziem takes a close look at Microsoft Word performance in a benchmark with 4500 measurements in 5 categories covering 6 versions and 12 years of releases to determine whether Word has become slower or faster over the years. Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:32:59 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Amjith Ramanujam) Benchmarks 22 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News ahz1 http://www.osnews.com/story/20097/Face_Off_Windows_vs_Linux_Real_World_RAM_and_Disk_Tests/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20097/Face_Off_Windows_vs_Linux_Real_World_RAM_and_Disk_Tests/ David Williams over at iTWire has done a comparison of Windows vs Linux. It is performed by doing functionally identical tasks in both the OSes. This comparison is not a fair one by any measure. The laptops running the Windows and Linux were different in the hardware config and the software used for the tests were comparable but clearly different (MS Office vs OpenOffice; IE vs Firefox 3). Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:54:15 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Amjith Ramanujam) Benchmarks 68 http://www.osnews.com/topics/50 News