My pyloronix test was done using 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 tested the operating systems with different benchmarks, including browser benchmarks, video encoding, image encoding, blenders, and much more. Windows 11 is a 45% user tested out of six operating systems, which means the best operating system for Alder Lake systems. The re-election of Windows 11 is due to the problem that the Linux scheduler has with the Alder Lake CPU. Alder Lake has two different types of cores, the big and fast Power cores (P-cores) together with a large and powerful Efficiency core (E-cores), which chew with surprising speed through background processes. This Linux scheduler was designed to control many core clusters, but it couldn’t differentiate between different types of cores, such as Alder Lake’s P-cores and E-cores. Unfortunately, that means that the scheduler doesn’t know the performance differences between the cores, as does Windows 10. Next, the scheduler can use the E-core to send it to the faster P-cores, and vice versa. As you can see on our Core i9-12900K exam, this type of performance problem is present in Windows 10, and for such reasons as the same: For example, Linux and Windows 10 will have to adopt a mode of communicating with Intel’s Thread Director, which feeds the operating system with real-time telemetry to get to the correct types of cores to gain the best performance. According to Phoronix, there is no solution to this problem, which is mainly because it has disabling the E cores on Linux. Hopefully Linux 5.16 will update the version of Alder Lake, but there is no guarantee to when or if these changes will arrive.
