Benchmark Results: Synthetics
Though I generally prefer real-world application-based benchmarks to synthetics, it's always fun to compare a simple score with your friends (or enemies) online. These two benchmarks are insanely easy to use and have an equally simple system in place to compare your scores with others. They are also the only two synthetic benchmarks that run on all three major platforms, which makes comparing any machine to another possible. No more excuses.
GeekBench
Since GeekBench is notorious for giving a different result on each run, we ran the test five times. After discarding the highest and lowest scores we then averaged the remaining three to get our final score.
Karmic came out as the winner in our GeekBench runs against Jaunty by a solid four percent.
PeaceKeeper
PeaceKeeper is a free browser-based benchmarking tool from FutureMark, the makers of 3DMark. I ran this test in a single tab in a single browser window with no other applications open. Since Jaunty comes pre-installed with Mozilla Firefox 3.0.15, which is quite a bit older than Karmic's 3.5.5, I decided to run 3.5.5 in Jaunty as well. Both 9.10 and 9.04 were running the 32-bit development version of Google Chrome on Linux (build 4.0.249.0).
Well, Jaunty clearly lost in both the Firefox tests. Karmic's default almost doubled the score of Jaunty's, while still remaining more than 150 points ahead when 9.04 was running 3.5.5 as well. Chrome was another matter entirely. While 9.04 beat 9.10, the margin of victory is nearly insignificant. The real surprise is that, in Linux, the performance of the development version of Google's browser almost doubles that of Mozilla's latest. Though I am not surprised, Chrome's speed advantage is very noticeable.
