Ubuntu 20.04 vs. Windows 10 WSL/WSL2 Performance In 170+ Benchmarks

Earlier this month was a look at the Windows 10 May 2020 Update performance for WSL/WSL2 with many benchmarks and testing on an Intel Core i9 10900K. Here is a follow-up round of testing this time with HEDT performance in the form of running an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X and running even more benchmarks up to 172 in total for this comparison of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS against WSL and WSL2 performance on this newest Microsoft Windows 10 update.

This round of testing is our largest look ever at WSL/WSL2 performance while using the recently released Windows 10 May 2020 Update. The same system used for all of this testing was an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X at stock frequencies, ASUS ROG ZENITH II EXTREME, 64GB of RAM, 1TB Corsair Force MP600 NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics.

A clean/stock install of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was compared to Windows 10 May 2020 Update with all available updates as of testing. Ubuntu 20.04 on WSL was tested followed by upgrading it to Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. For those wondering about GPU tests with the newest Windows Insider Preview builds, some preliminary figures are coming up in a follow-up article next week.

With Ubuntu 20.04 vs. WSL vs. WSL2, a wide assortment of benchmarks were carried out via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite automated benchmarking software.