Linux 3.13, NVIDIA GPUs Won Over November
During November 2013 on Phoronix there were 308 news stories and 30 full-length articles / Linux hardware reviews. That averages out to more than 10 news postings per day and one article for the month, all written by your's truly, including all of the associated Linux benchmarking and testing. Phoronix work happens 365 days per year in my conquest of enriching the Linux hardware experiencing and advancing Linux/open-source benchmarking.
So before getting to the most popular content of the month, if you appreciate all of the effort I put into the site please view Phoronix without AdBlock or join Phoronix Premium. Premium benefits include an improved log-in experience (new!), ad-free browsing, the ability to read multi-page articles on a single page, notices of upcoming content to be published on Phoronix (new!), and your feedback/requests are most highly regarded. You can also support Phoronix by considering a PayPal holiday tip and using our Amazon affiliate shopping link (also found on the Phoronix home-page) when making Amazon.com purchases this holiday season. Thank you; this year on Phoronix I alone have written 236 full-length articles and 2,637 news articles on top of my full-time development work on Phoronix Test Suite and its commercial arm and my other business ventures.
Benchmarking never takes a holiday at Phoronix.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN: Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu 13.10
Last week on Phoronix there was the first Linux review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti that also included results from other GeForce GTX 700 GPUs -- including the TITAN -- and earlier Kepler and Fermi GPUs while on the AMD side was a range of Radeon graphics card up to and including the AMD Radeon R9 290. For today's Linux review to kick off a new week of benchmarking is a closer look at the NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN when running Ubuntu Linux and comparing the OpenGL performance to Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro x64.
13-Way AMD Open Linux GPU Drivers On The Source Engine
For your viewing pleasure today is a 13-way AMD Radeon graphics card comparison when testing out the open-source Radeon Gallium3D drivers on the wide spectrum of ATI/AMD GPUs while looking at the performance for Valve's Source Engine with Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2. Given the imminent arrival of Steam Machines and SteamOS to push Linux gaming into its long-awaited spotlight, is AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver capable of delivering a reasonable level of performance?
Fedora 20 Beta vs. Ubuntu 13.10 vs. Scientific Linux 6.4
Last week I shared results of Fedora 19 vs. Fedora 20 Beta Linux performance from an AMD Opteron system and those results were of much interest to many Phoronix readers, so to kick off a new week of Linux benchmarking are results from that system when adding in Ubuntu 13.10 and Scientific Linux 6.4 (RHEL-based) to this Linux OS comparison.
AMD Radeon R9 290 On Linux
AMD unveiled the Radeon R9 290 graphics card at the beginning of November as one step down from the new flagship Radeon R9 290X graphics card. Numerous Windows reviews praised the graphics card for its great performance, but what wasn't clear at the time was how the Linux performance and compatibility was for this new $399 USD graphics card. AMD hadn't offered any review samples to Phoronix for conducting any Linux-based testing and benchmarking, but it's more clear now why that didn't happen: the Linux performance isn't stellar. I bought an XFX Radeon R9 290 and now there's many Linux benchmarks coming out of this graphics card that's riddled by what might be driver issues. I already regret having purchased the AMD Radeon R9 290 for use on Linux; the graphics card is hot, power hungry, noisy, and the OpenGL results aren't too good.
Fedora 19 vs. Fedora 20 Beta Benchmarks
With this week's release of Fedora 20 Beta, I have carried out some benchmarks comparing the performance of Fedora 19 to this latest development release.
Intel Linux Driver Almost Neck-And-Neck With Windows 8.1
Intel released a big Windows graphics driver update that for Haswell hardware now provides OpenGL 4.2 support -- while the Intel Linux driver just hit the milestone of OpenGL 3.3 support. To see how the latest Windows and Linux Intel graphics drivers compare, I ran some new benchmarks on Windows 8.1 against Ubuntu 13.10 to see how the performance pans out in various OpenGL game benchmarks and other graphics workloads.
21-Way Open-Source AMD/Intel/NVIDIA GPU Benchmarks On Linux
If you are hoping to snag some deals on computer hardware this holiday shopping season, for helping guide you in any graphics card purchases are a fresh round of benchmarks of 21 different graphics processors from the Intel HD Graphics, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA GeForce families tested on their respective open-source Linux graphics drivers.
Linux 3.0, 3.4, 3.10, 3.12 AMD Kernel Benchmarks
How does the Linux kernel performance compare if simply bouncing between some of the recent long-term kernel releases? Well, to try to answer that question on Phoronix today we have benchmarks of the Linux 3.0.101, 3.4.68, 3.10.18, and 3.12.0 kernel releases tested from an AMD Opteron system with Radeon graphics.
The most popular Phoronix news meanwhile was:
13 Reasons Linux 3.13 Is Going To Be Very Exciting
While the merge window for the Linux 3.13 kernel isn't even over yet, this next major kernel update is already looking to be rather exciting with a number of new features.
Linux 3.12 Kernel Released; Linux 4.0 Planning Talked Up
As was anticipated, the Linux 3.12 kernel was released this afternoon. The Linux 3.12 kernel is a mighty big update but beyond announcing its debut, Linus Torvalds also made mention of a delay in the Linux 3.13 merge window and has begun expressing possible plans for a Linux 4.0 release in about one year's time.
The Linux 3.13 Kernel Is Already Super Exciting
The merge window hasn't even officially opened yet on the Linux 3.13 kernel but it's already super exciting and I can't wait for the new code to start hitting mainline and to benchmark these massive changes to the Linux kernel. Here's just a few things to expect so far but it's already gearing up to be a super exciting release and perhaps the best of 2013.
ACPI, Power Management Get Big Linux 3.13 Updates
The Linux 3.13 kernel merge window has become even more exciting even though it's not even officially open yet. Besides many to-be-merged changes talked about on Phoronix already, the ACPI and power management pull is particularly exciting for ARM and Intel Linux users.
Linux 3.13 Gets A Second Helping Of Power Management
A second pull request has been submitted for the Linux 3.13 kernel that provides further updates to the often less than desirable ACPI and power management code.
GCC 4.9 Continues Piling On New Features
When GCC 4.9 is released in 2014 it will be coming in hot on new features with a large assortment of improvements and new functionality for the open-source compiler.
GCC Looks To Turn Off Java, Replace With Go Or ADA
GCC developers from multiple companies are beginning to reach agreement that it's time for Java to be turned off by default in GCC. The Java compiler support in GCC is in the form of GCJ, but it doesn't see much active development these days with more of the Java work happening in OpenJDK. Developers are looking to disable Java from the default GCC build process but to potentially replace it with the Go or ADA languages.
Linus Acknowledges 32-Bit Linux As Less Important
The Linux 3.12 kernel was released on Sunday evening but prior to that was a last-minute pull request that got rejected by Linus Torvalds and with it he reaffirmed the focus of Linux on 64-bit.
You can keep up to date with all of the latest Phoronix content via our RSS feed, Facebook, and Twitter.
Add A Comment
