Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion DP2 Battles Ubuntu 10.10
GCC 4.2.1 is not slower on Linux than Mac OS X in general as the time it took to build the ImageMagick program on Ubuntu 10.10 was faster than with Mac OS X 10.6.6. With Mac OS X 10.7 there is still a big speed-up in compilation speed, likely due to Apple finishing the 64-bit transition, while the speed in DP2 appears slightly behind DP1. The compilation speed though for the 11A419 build is still slightly ahead of Ubuntu 10.10.
Mac OS X 10.7 DP1 had really jumped forward with its Dhrystone 2 speed compared to Mac OS X 10.6.6, but it has pulled back some in DP2. The Dhrystone 2 speed in Lion DP2 is still better than in Snow Leopard and even inches ahead of Ubuntu 10.10 for this computational test.
The C-Ray ray-tracing performance is slightly faster in Lion than Snow Leopard, but for the most part there are not any major changes between the four tested operating systems in their stock configurations.