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Windows 11 performance overwhelms Linux on Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake-S Core i9-12900K PC

Intel and Windows 11 logos side by side with Windows 11 default wallpaper as background

Back at its Architecture Day 2021 event when Intel shared the core design details of its Alder Lake CPU architecture, the firm stated that Windows 11 was optimized in a way to best take advantage of the Alder Lake's Performance Hybrid architecture and the new Thread Director technology that helps Windows 11 task scheduling.

To test those claims and see how well Alder Lake fares on Windows 11 against Linux, Phoronix decided to do a deep-dive and benchmarked the recently launched Core i9-12900K from the Alder Lake-S family which is Intel's 12th gen desktop flagship part.

The testbed consisted of:

  • Core i9-12900K
  • ROG STRIX Z690E GAMING WIFI
  • 64GB Corsair DDR5-4400
  • Windows 11 Pro Build 22000

You can find more details on the testbed here.

Overall the 12900K has put up an impressive showing on the Windows platform managing to beat out the Linux systems in most of the tests. While there were many more tests (a total of 104) conducted, we have only shown here the most interesting results.

First, we have a few browser and web application benchmarks using Selenium:

Alder Lake performance on Windows 11 vs Linux
Alder Lake performance on Windows 11 vs Linux
Alder Lake performance on Windows 11 vs Linux

After that, we have a couple of AV1 decoding and encoding tests respectively.

Alder Lake performance on Windows 11 vs Linux
Alder Lake performance on Windows 11 vs Linux

Finally, performances in a decompression test and a large data visualization test have been provided.

Alder Lake performance on Windows 11 vs Linux
Alder Lake performance on Windows 11 vs Linux

Out of the total 104, Phoronix says the Windows 11 system came out on top in 45.2% of the tests. The publication has also noted that a previous Tiger Lake-based CPU was slower against Ubuntu compared to Alder Lake kind of validating Intel's claim that the architecture carries Windows 11 specific optimizations, at least at the moment when compared with Linux.

Alder Lake performance on Windows 11 vs Linux

Alder Lake performance on Windows 11 vs Linux

You can find the full performance review with a lot more benchmark numbers on Phoronix's website linked in the source link below.

Source and images: Phoronix

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