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.

The AMD Ryzen 7 7840U is AMD's top-tier Phoenix U-series laptop SoC with 8 cores /1 6 threads and a 3.3GHz base clock with 5.1GHz boost clock. The Ryzen 7 7840U has a default TDP of 28 Watts. The Ryzen 7 7840U also sports integrated RDNA3 graphics although that isn't the focus of today's article: this round of testing is just looking at the CPU/system performance while a follow-up article is going to look precisely at the Linux graphics performance of these Zen 4 laptop SoCs.

The configurations tested for this article included:

- Microsoft Windows 11 Home as shipped by Acer on this Swift Edge 16 laptop.

- Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS out-of-the-box with its Linux 6.2 HWE kernel.

- The same Ubuntu LTS installation but moving to the Linux 6.5 Git kernel where the AMD P-State EPP driver is used by default rather than the CPU Schedutil default on prior kernels.

- Repeating the Linux 6.5 Git kernel but with disabling the AMD Inception mitigation and leaving all other vulnerabilities at their defaults... Just as this Inception mitigation dropped last week while preparing these tests and to rule out some of the Linux 6.5 performance differences compared to Linux 6.2, it made sense adding this run.

The same Acer Swift Edge 16 was used for all of this testing... Any reported hardware differences in the system table just come down to differences of how the information is reported by the OS, such as reporting base vs. boost clock speed or differences in how the memory configuration is reported by the OS.

A wide variety of cross-platform software was used for seeing how the new AMD Ryzen 7 Zen 4 SoCs are performing between Windows 11 and Linux.