Windows 10 May 2020 vs. Ubuntu 20.04 Is A Surprisingly Heated Race On The Intel Core i9 10900K

Last week I provided some fresh benchmarks of Windows 10 May 2020 vs. Linux on AMD. As has been common across multiple systems particularly with Threadripper, using Linux leads to a ~20% uptick in performance at large over Windows. While at times we have seen similar advantages for Intel CPUs on Linux, with the new Intel Core i9 10900K Comet Lake processor it is a very competitive race between Windows 10 May 2020 Update and Ubuntu Linux.

When running 101 benchmarks native to both Windows and Linux on the Core i9 10900K under the new Windows 10 May 2020 release compared to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, it's the most competitive cross-OS battle I have likely ever seen... For the most part the results were neck-and-neck compared to the usual dominance of Linux we are accustomed to seeing.

Both operating systems were running with the Core i9 10900K at stock speeds (clock differences in the system table and other hardware listing differences just come down to how the information is exposed by the OS for parsing) with Gigabyte Z490 AORUS MASTER motherboard, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3000 memory, 25-GB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card. With Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the Linux 5.7 kernel was upgraded in order to have working network support and the latest kernel experience. Windows 10 May 2020 Update was running with all available Microsoft updates.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a wide range of benchmarks were carried out spanning multiple different areas.