Phoronix have pit Apple's OS X 10.5 against Ubuntu 8.10 in a battle to the death. For this testing they 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. They 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 their 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.

The SQLite database library is used by many software projects including Mozilla Firefox and Skype, including a number of Apple products. SQLite is extensively used in Mac OS X as well as with the iPhone and iPod Touch. Mac OS X was superior to Ubuntu in SQLIte 3.6.3 when measuring the time to perform 12,500 database row insertions. Mac OS X 10.5.5 was over four times faster at performing these SQL database operations than Ubuntu x86 and x86_64. The read and write XML performance using our PHP-driven test was much closer between Leopard and Intrepid, but the x86_64 Ubuntu had won both tests.

We ended out our Mac OS X and Ubuntu comparison with several Java tests. In Sunflow, which is a global illumination and image synthesis engine with a ray-tracing core, Mac OS X and its Sun Java 1.5 stack was over 40% faster than Ubuntu 8.10 in conjunction with IcedTea providing Java 1.6. The Java performance in Mac OS X was similarly faster when using Bork as a file encryption benchmark. Completing the benchmarks, Ubuntu was faster in its Java computational performance with the Java version of SciMark 2.0 in FFT (Fast Fourier Transform), SOR (Successive Over-Relaxation), and composite tests.

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.