Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” is set to be released on Thursday and while there are a number of new features to talk about in this latest release, the Phoronix Test Suite software has been busy analyzing the performance of this latest release. More here

For the four systems tested, the power regression was near universal. With the Atom netbook, the Ubuntu 11.04 release wasn’t always worse than Ubuntu 10.10, but it was worse under graphics. With the other systems, the regressions occurred regardless of idling or load for the disk, CPU, or GPU. The extent of the mobile testing was limited to the hardware available, but spanned Intel Pentium M, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo, and Atom architectures.