Intel Alder Lake Users On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Will Want To Switch To A Newer Kernel

The Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox performance also show the significant performance difference from Ubuntu 21.10/22.04 out-of-the-box and Linux 5.16+. The 5.15 kernels and older show particularly high variation because it was very common between the repeated benchmark runs that sometimes the browser would get tasked to a P cores and other times the E cores.

If taking the geometric mean across all the tests run (see this OpenBenchmarking.org result page for all the benchmark results in full), Ubuntu 22.04 LTS performance out-of-the-box was largely inline with Ubuntu 21.10. That minimal difference isn't too surprising with the Ubuntu 21.10 to 22.04 transition going just from Linux 5.13 to 5.15, keeping to GCC 11.2, etc. However, as shown by the wide variety of benchmarks carried out, the Intel Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" performance is significantly improved if moving to at least Linux 5.16. The geometric mean across all the benchmarks show around a 14% improvement for the i9-12900K when moving from Ubuntu 22.04's stock kernel to Linux 5.16 or later releases.

It's rather surprising given the popularity of Intel Alder Lake that Canonical's kernel team hadn't back-ported more of the fixes/improvements to their Linux 5.15 LTS based kernel build. In fact, if my memory serves me, it's just this basically 3 lines of new code is what helped out Alder Lake hybrid processors the most for Linux 5.16 and has been mainlined since last November. When checking today, that patch hasn't been back-ported to the Ubuntu Jammy kernel build nor any other last minute ADL improvements. We'll see though if the attention to this leads to any zero-day/soon kernel updates for improving Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on Intel's latest processors. Fortunately at least with the likes of Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA it's easy moving to a newer kernel version on Ubuntu -- even outside of Alder Lake I'd certainly recommend going to v5.17 for newer Intel and AMD graphics driver improvements and other bleeding-edge hardware work and improvements in general.