AMD Ryzen 7 7840U Windows 11 vs. Linux CPU Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Ryzen 7 7840U Windows 11 vs. Linux CPU Performance

Over the past month I've been delivering a number of Linux laptop tests with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U for that Zen 4 "Phoenix" SoC within an Acer Swift Edge 16. One of the requests that has come up with my ongoing testing has been how well the default Microsoft Windows 11 installation compares to loading up Linux on this 8-core AMD Zen 4 laptop. Well, in this article is a look at the Linux performance compared to Windows 11, including when making use of the Linux 6.5 development kernel where AMD P-State is now the default and also for seeing what workloads are impacted by the recent AMD Inception vulnerability.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-7840u-windows-linux

[Terr-E]

Hehe, the irony that the Windows 11 geometric mean comes out to 22.04 !

[Psyord]

Does Win 11 have the inception patch already? Would be fair assumption that it takes a hit too.

[Michael]

Does Win 11 have the inception patch already? Would be fair assumption that it takes a hit too.

The Windows testing took place at end of June when initially receiving the laptop.

[Mitch]

It looks like the latest kernel provides best Perf/Watt. That's awesome to see and aligns with work AMD has been doing on each new kernel. I think the only thing I've struggled with is how to limit my 6850u clockspeeds and turning off the core boosting stuff when I'm on battery and using p-state Active EPP. Some of the documentation I've read on how to do that seems to only work on Intel.

[mSparks]

What to say, other than

Noice.

[HEL88]

Linux fans who visit the general computer forums and the Windows forums always write that Linux is several times faster than Windows, and that Windows is so slow that it is unworkable.

The linux foundation pays them for this?? Is that what the donations are for?

Has open source religion brainwashed them?

[avis]

Michael has never mentioned whether he prepares Windows for benchmarking properly.

And that's a lot of work that needs to be done otherwise you could be getting quite low results.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/windows-11-tweaks-for-gpu-benchmark.287480/

[sophisticles]

As i have said in the past, I care more about stability than raw performance and this foes for most things, from computers to cars to power tools.

I used to do consulting for video work and one of my favorite tests for testing hardware and software was this long, complex, 4k encode, with lots of filters, both GPU and CPU powered and a couple of audio tracks; this project was done using Shotcut. This specific encode would take over 9 hours if done with no GPU acceleration on a Ryzen 1600, with GPU acceleration of some of the filters, it would drop to about 5.5 hours. The performance different between Windows 10 and Ubuntu was negligible.

What mattered was stability, with projects of this type, I found both Windows and Ubuntu would sometimes either lock up, Shotcut would crash outright or the system would reboot. I looked at all the usual suspects, ram, power supply, cooling, etc, but the thing was it was never consistent, sometimes the projects would finish fine and other times i would lose hours worth of work.

I finally bought a cheap 4790 based Xeon and a cheap Gigabyte board, with the same ram, power supply and drives, the system was about 20% slower in CPU only tasks but is was rock solid stable. Swapping out the GTX960 for a cheap Fermi based Quadro and I could finish jobs like this one after the other, processing video for days completely reliably.

Fast forward to today, and as I mentioned in March i lost my job. As a way of keeping myself busy and improving my skill set, I started a couple of podcasts, one politically themed and one sports themed and I have been recording and editing audio with Audacity. I have also put up a few website related to these podcasts that feature JS powered AI, this is meant more as a learning exercise for myself and to show employers some of the skills i bring to the table.

If you want to get the real measure of a distro, you need to use it for real work, stuff that takes hours, taxes the system and is critical, stuff were you can't afford to lose data.

I have found that most of the distros available are not reliable, for one reason or another. some of the issues that i have encountered are:

1) Audacity failing to launch if installed via package manager even though the appimage works fine.

2) Audacity stops working after a while, with no ability to save your work for extended periods of time, then if you wait long enough it comes back to life and you can save your recording. This one is very nerve-racking

3) Pluma just stops working. I use Pluma for HTML, CSS, JS and Python, and sometimes it will just stop accepting inputs, such as the return key or backspace and it will stop allowing you to save your work.

4) I use a laptop that has a 17" 1600x900 monitor and I hook it up to a 50" 1080P TV that i use as a monitor. Windows 10 handles this setup properly and without a hiccup, regardless of whether I mirror the displays, or extend them and set one or the other as the primary and it also handles it properly when i shut down the TV to pull the HDMI out and switch to using just the laptop monitor.

I have tried Kubuntu, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu, PoP OS, Mint Mate, Mint Proper, Mint Debian, Fedora Workstation, Fedora Mate, Fedora KDE, Fedora Cinnamon, PC Linux OS, MX Linux (both editions), Manjaro (all of them), every variant of Gecko Linux (which I normally like), every variant of Spiral Linux, if you name a distro, I tried it, none of them can properly handle this monitor setup.

The only one that handles it properly is the latest edition of Ubuntu Mate, this wasn't the case before, it used to have problems as well, but this latest editions based on Lunar Lobster is the only one that gives me the Windows 10 experience of dependability.

Which brings me to the point, it doesn't matter if Linux is a bit faster in this benchmark or that one. What matter is can i rely on it, does it behave as expected, can i count on it to finish a big project? If the answer is No, then it does me no good.

[sophisticles]

Michael has never mentioned whether he prepares Windows for benchmarking properly.

And that's a lot of work that needs to be done otherwise you could be getting quite low results.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/t...chmark.287480/

I can assure you he doesn't. He has stated that he sets all benchmarks up so that they are as automated as possible, remember all the Clear Linux tests where CL was tested with the performance governor and AVX512 compile time optimizations and distros would be tested with the power save governor and Windows with the balanced power settings.

Once you normalize all the systems so that they hit the same clock speeds, the performance differences largely go away.