Make your Atom netbook faster, part 2

Here's one for random luck. I talked about Intel Atom optimizations a few days ago, without having an actual Atom to toy with. Well, Phoronix's Michael Larabel did some of that work for me.

This graph shows the performance difference between four mainstream distros, where Ubuntu and Mandriva win hands down. Mind you, the difference from Mandriva to Fedora 10 is of 50%, in this GZip benchmark. 50%! Not the 15% I talked about earlier.
This is more of a case of bad optimization vs regular optimization, so you still have plenty of optimization to do.
At least I/O performance correlates with GZip, which is probably affecting the GZip results(it depends a lot on I/O also, not just CPU).
As for the rest, it's pretty much the same winners, with varying margins, usually smaller, still significant in some cases, for a simple distro change. OpenSUSE is a catastrophe all around, better stay away from that one.

If you're lazy, you don't even need to use ICC, just use the right distro and do a little benchmarking once in a while.