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

It was quite interesting to see the Dell XPS 13 9310 with i7-1165G7 delivering generally faster web browser performance on Ubuntu 20.10 over Windows 10.

When taking the geometric mean of all these dozens of benchmarks ran under both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.10, the Ryzen 5 4500U on the Lenovo laptop was about 4.5% faster with Ubuntu Linux. Meanwhile with the Intel Core i7 1165G7 in the Dell XPS 13 9310, running Ubuntu 20.10 had around an 8% advantage over Windows.

These benchmarks across many different benchmarks, including many real-world workloads, showed that Ubuntu 20.10 on Tiger Lake was able to perform similarly or in some cases even better than Windows 10. Keep in mind all of these tests were done with Ubuntu 20.10 rather than Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which as shown earlier this week is important for Tiger Lake performance particularly in single-threaded workloads while the multi-threaded tests tended to pull back on this Ubuntu Linux release officially releasing tomorrow.

As there still doesn't seem to be much in the way of other Dell XPS 13 9310 tests out there, hopefully these results were also useful to you if simply wondering about the Core i7 1165G7 Windows performance compared to the mid-range Ryzen 5 4500U. The Core i7 1165G7 overall came out to being a few percent faster than the Ryzen 5 4500U with the workloads run for this article but obviously the Renoir CPU performance was leading in the multi-threaded workloads where the six cores pay off. The Lenovo laptop with Ryzen 5 4500U also cost just half of what I paid for the Dell XPS 13 9310.

The next of the Intel Tiger Lake Linux benchmarks will be a deep dive into the Xe Graphics performance, including oneAPI Level Zero and OpenCL and more Vulkan compute. Like all these Linux benchmarks and appreciate the laptop coverage? Join Phoronix Premium as the best way to show your support and make the continued testing possible.