Windows 11 beats Linux with Alder Lake processors, planner to blame

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A report from Phoronix found that Intel Alder Lake processors perform much better in a Windows 11 environment than with Linux-based operating systems. The issue is related to issues with Linux’s cluster scheduler, which is not optimized for the Alder Lake hybrid architecture. This means that Alder Lake, which are now the new best processors for gaming, is better suited to Windows 11 than to Linux. This is somewhat surprising given that Linux generally outperforms all versions of Windows.

Phoronix has been tested with a Core i9-12900K and Windows 11 Pro, Ubuntu 21.10 plus Linux 5.16 git, Ubuntu 21.10, Ubuntu 21.1.0 plus Linux 5.15, Clear Linux 35250 and Fedora Workstation 35.

Phoronix has tested operating systems with a range of different benchmarks, including browser benchmarks, video encoding, image encoding, mixer, and more.

Windows 11 Pro won 45% of the tests on all six operating systems, making it the most optimal operating system for Alder Lake systems.

(Image credit: Phoronix)

Windows 11’s victory was due to issues with the Linux Scheduler and its interaction with Alder Lake processors. As a reminder, Alder Lake chips are made up of two different types of hearts: speed.

This Linux scheduler is designed to control multiple core clusters, but it was not designed to differentiate between different types of cores, such as Alder Lake’s P and E cores. Unfortunately, this means that the scheduler is not aware of the performance differences between cores, much like we see with Windows 10. As a result, the scheduler will send workloads to electronic cores which should be sent to cores. P faster, and vice versa.

As you can see in our Core i9-12900K test, this same kind of performance issue is present in Windows 10, and for similar reasons: Ultimately, Linux and Windows 10 will have to adopt a way to interact with the Thread Director. from Intel, which feeds the operating system real-time telemetry so it can better schedule threads to the right types of cores, to extract the best performance.

According to Phoronix, there is currently no workaround for this issue (except for completely disabling E cores) for Linux. Hopefully Linux 5.16 will introduce better compatibility with Alder Lake, but there is no guarantee when or if these changes will happen.

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