cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/linux/t/646160
With currently reviewing the HP Z6 G5 A workstation powered by the new 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX Zen 4 processor, one of the areas I was curious about was how well HP’s tuned Microsoft Windows 11 compares to that of Linux.
While this is cool, but I am interested in a comparison with a fresh windows install. This article says it’s out of the box from HP, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have some dumb processes running, chunking performance… I’m confident linux would still outperform but this is quite an insane gap on display.
That’s a fair comment. But on the other hand, if you are spending a fortune on a CPU the size of your hand (look at that thing in the article!) then there’s a good chance you’re using it for business purposes, and either you or your IT department will be very keen to have a completely vender-supported stack. Enthusiasts with fresh OS installs will not be representative of users of this tech - AMD haven’t really been targetting it at gamer desktops.
Of course, comparing both would be even better, see whether it is an HP crapware issue…
Don’t most businesses cut the bloat out and put their own builds on it? Sure they put their own software on that will hurt performance but it seems fresh vs fresh would be give better metrics.
Totally agree, it’s two different tests and use cases. Most people will run it how it comes out of the box and that’s probably more representative of the real world.
I just think it’s not entirely fair to say “windows is 20% slower” when we have no idea which trash HP loaded it up with. If I managed an IT Dept and learned my $$$$ hardware lost 1/5 of it’s performance I’d certainly be pushing HP for solutions. Or maybe they’d prefer to take 20% off the price?
20% is a LOT. That’s probably because of the random shit that nobody ever asked for but windows is always doing in the background anyway. Building a search index, windows update (which consumes an insane amount of CPU for a completely unreasonable amount of time sometimes), other individual updater services (because there can’t be one program that updates everything because every vendor does their own proprietary bullshit to handle updates), compressing and sending all you personal data to microsoft and of course the pre-installed McAffee (on trial license) that works hard to make your system less secure (that HP probably installed for you because apperently you haven’t paid enough money for the computer, so you must pay with your patience and your privacy as well). Depending on the benchmark, the pathetic legacy file system windows uses might also play a role.
No, it’s because the windows scheduler literally cannot handle that many cores. it simply does not know how to allocate work effectively.
The Windows scheduler is so stupid chip manufacturers manipulate the BIOS/ACPI tables to force it to make better decisions (particularly with SMT) rather than wait on MS to fix it.
Linux just shrugs, figures out the thread topology anyway and makes the right decisions regardless.
I have to use Chocolatey, Winget, Windows Store and invididual updating to use the tools I need in Windows, It’s ridiculous. I only use Flatpak and Zypper in my Linux partition.
So this is not about ubuntu, but really just any kind of linux? What a shitty title
Ubuntu is relatively heavy. Lighter distros probably do even better.
Always did on my hardware at least. When I was using Windows, my old laptop started lagging very much and it was becoming unbearable. I could not get a new one immediately. I got to know about Linux one day and installed it to try it out because there was not really anything else I could try.
I could not believe myself how buttery smooth my laptop became after that. 95% of the games that I used to play on Windows run with more performance on Linux.
I’m typing this on an 8-or-9-year-old laptop that used to be a Windows machine years ago. Exact same experience–it got too sluggish so I wiped it and installed Linux and it’s been fine ever since.
I sure am eyeing that new Framework, though… :)
Yeah. Maybe even better with a distro with a more updated kernel btw.
(btw)
It’s not a “shitty title”, because Ubuntu Linux is the thing they actually tested.
Whether Debian or Fedora or Alpine or Void or whatever would do better or worse is not a given, and isn’t something the OP can comment on because they didn’t test it.
We can probably infer that gains of a similar amount would be seen on most mainstream distros (as they’re all pretty similar under the covers), but that’s not on the OP.
In particular, Ubuntu ships with various non-free drivers and kernel patches that will be present in some, but not all other distros.
If course it’s not on the OP, it’s on Phoronix. This is a shitty title from any party, but from them last least I would have expected more, instead of just attributing the performance to a specific distribution, the most corporate-y one no less.
Linux, the kernel, doesn’t operate in isolation. The system under test was Ubuntu, which comes with specific packages, package versions, patches, kernel configuration, and so on. It is reasonable to say that the combination between this specific operating system and hardware led to the observed outcome. Different combinations of software and hardware may yield other results or replicate the same outcome. The certainty of these outcomes can only be established through testing. Therefore, your outrage seems unwarranted, and your assertion is not only baseless but incorrect.
Ubuntu comes with various drivers, kernel patches, and configuration options that other distros lack or have their own replacement for. It also comes with a different kernel version (6.5 for 23.10) compared to other Linux distros out there.
I can’t tell you if these changes affect performance much, but there may be big performance differences between distros for specific workloads. Running the same tests on Arch or OpenSuse may produce different results, you can’t assume all Linux performs the same.
and makes it 100% slower with Snaps.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Going back to the original AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors, Linux has long possessed a performance lead over Microsoft Windows.
With Linux typically being the dominant OS of HPC systems and other large core count servers, the Linux kernel scheduler has coped better than various flavors of Windows when dealing with high core count processors.
Ubuntu 23.10 was run for providing a clean, out-of-the-box look at this common desktop/workstation Linux distribution.
The HP Z6 G5 A for all testing was configured with the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX at default frequencies, 8 x 16GB DDR5-5200 Hynix RDIMMs, Samsung MZVL21T0HCLR-00BH1 NVMe SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX A4000 16GB graphics.
A full review on the HP Z6 G5 A Threadripper workstation will be published in a separate article on Phoronix in early December.
From there the up-to-date Windows 11 Pro Build 22631 (H2’23) was tested against Ubuntu 23.10 with its stable release updates.
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