Windows 10 vs. Eight Linux Distributions On The Threadripper 3970X

Motivated by last week's Windows vs. Linux benchmarks with the 128-thread AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X here are Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise benchmarks on the 32-core / 64-thread AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X up against eight Linux distributions.

There has been differing information on performance benefits to Windows 10 Enterprise over Windows 10 Professional on large HEDT CPUs. In the case with our 3990X testing last week, we did see Windows 10 Enterprise offering slight performance benefits over the Professional edition. So I then carried out Windows 10 Enterprise vs. Professional tests on the 32-core / 64-thread Threadripper 3970X. With the 3970X, unlike our 3990X tests, the Windows 10 performance was the same across both editions. Not too surprising. But then for making this testing more interesting are benchmarks of those two Windows 10 builds up against eight Linux distributions.

Windows 10 Professional and Windows 10 Enterprise were on Build 18363 with all available system updates as of testing plus the latest drivers. The Linux distributions tested were CentOS Stream, Clear Linux, Debian Bullseye Testing, Fedora Workstation 31, Manjaro Linux 19.0, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS, and a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 20.04.

The same system was used throughout all testing with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X at stock speeds, ASUS ROG ZENITH II EXTREME, 4 x 16GB Corsair DDR4-3600 memory, 1TB Corsair Force MP600 NVMe SSD, and Radeon VII graphics card.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite around four dozen Windows and Linux benchmarks were run across the tested operating system configurations.