Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 20.10 Performance With Intel Tiger Lake, AMD Renoir

Stemming from our initial Intel Core i7 1165G7 "Tiger Lake" benchmarks on the Dell XPS 13 9310 last week and then also discovering better single-threaded performance on Ubuntu 20.10, one of the pressing questions was whether this is expected performance on Linux or if it's coming up short of Microsoft Windows for this first tier-one notebook to market with Intel Tiger Lake. So following those earlier tests I proceeded to do a Windows 10 Pro with all available updates comparison on Ubuntu 20.10 with the i7-1165G7. For added context, the same software stack and tests were repeated on an AMD Ryzen "Renoir" notebook.

Today's article answers the question of Intel Tiger Lake performance on if it's coming up short against Windows and where any outliers are between the Windows and Linux support for these latest-generation Intel mobile processors. Plus with the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U "Renoir" Lenovo Flex 15 performance added in there it also helps address whether any of the tests/benchmarks may be favoring one operating system over the other and ultimately seeing how the Windows vs. Linux raw performance is for these autumn 2020 notebooks.

Windows 10 Pro Build 19041 (Windows 10 2004) was run with all available updates as of testing and installing the latest Windows drivers for the laptops. On the Linux side, Ubuntu 20.10 was run in its near final state on each laptop given the improvements we've seen for Tiger Lake out of this brand new Ubuntu release and it using the fresh Linux 5.8 kernel and Mesa 20.2. The laptops were the same under each of the tests without any modifications, any differences in the system table just come down to how the CPU clock frequencies and other details are exposed under each operating system with the information being automatically collected.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of benchmarks were run that are of good and similar quality under both Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux.