Windows 11 vs. Linux Performance For Intel Core i9 12900K In Mid-2022

Last year when the Intel Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" processor launched, Windows 11 was outperforming Linux to much surprise in general but explainable due to some late Linux kernel patches around Intel's hybrid architecture. Back in February I looked at the situation again and Linux started outrunning Windows 11 on the i9-12900K with the latest Linux kernel at the time. But with a few more months having passed and for the Intel Alder Lake hybrid processors to mature under Windows and Linux, how do things stand now? Here are some new benchmarks.

Many readers have been eager to see fresh Windows 11 vs. Linux performance tests for Alder Lake. Earlier this year with more recent kernel versions having important performance fixes for Alder Lake, Linux is more competitive against Windows and like we are used to seeing on prior generations of Intel CPUs as well as AMD CPUs. This article offers a current look at that OS performance.

The same Alder Lake system was under test of the Intel Core i9 12900K at its stock speeds (reporting differences on the system table come down to how each OS exposes its base frequency), the ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-E GAMING WiFi motherboard, 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000 memory, 500GB WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD, and the Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card.

The operating systems under test today were Windows 11 Pro, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS again when moving to the Linux 5.18 stable kernel, and then Intel's Clear Linux 36580 for offering an aggressive out-of-the-box performance look at Alder Lake. All of the operating systems were tested at their defaults (sans the Linux 5.18 run on Ubuntu) and with all stable release updates as of testing.

So let's see the current out-of-the-box Windows vs. Linux performance for the high-end Intel Core i9 12900K.