Phoronix reports that Linux may soon achieve performance gains beyond the Windows 11 operating system as it continues to optimize for Intel’s hybrid CPU architecture. Looking back to Architecture Day 2021, chip giant Intel presented details on the core design of its 12th-generation Alder Lake CPUs with large and small core designs. At that time, the company said it had partnered with Microsoft to bring Thread Director task scheduling optimizations to the Windows 11 operating system to take full advantage of the hybrid architecture’s performance.
(Image via Neowin)
The November 2021 results showed that performance scheduling optimizations at the OS level allowed Windows 11 to easily beat the Linux platform, as well as Microsoft’s own Windows 10 (even with the older Lakefield CPUs).
Fast forward to August 2022 and things seem to be changing. It is clear that as the underlying Linux code continues to be optimized, it is closing the performance gap with Windows 11.
Linux kernel-based 5.18 tests show that the Alder Lake-S Core i9-12900K processor performs almost indistinguishably from Windows 11 on Ubuntu distributions.
Meanwhile, a new patch submitted by Intel Linux engineer Ricardo Neri shows that further optimizations are on the way.
(via Phoronix)
The new patch is said to improve the performance of large cores (P-cores) and task scheduling with small cores (E-cores).
On processors with a mix of higher frequency Synchronous Multi-Threading (SMT) cores and lower frequency cores that do not support SMT, if multiple SMT sibling processors are busy, the lower priority CPU will take over the former’s core tasks as appropriate.
Instead of having each SMT core be given a different priority, the new patch tweaks the asym-packing load balancer to identify busy sibling SMT cores and let the lower priority CPUs take over some of the tasks.
By removing these artificial priority scheduling factors, the system is able to avoid redundant hopping operations on mixed architecture processors, allowing lower priority cores to check the busiest queues of all SMT cores.
Thanks to this, Linux will soon overtake the Windows 11 operating system. This will also continue seamlessly given that the upcoming 13th generation of Raptor Lake (and subsequent product lines such as 14th generation Meteor Lake) are based on the same design philosophy.
Thanks to this, Linux will soon overtake the Windows 11 operating system. This will also continue seamlessly given that the upcoming 13th generation of Raptor Lake (and subsequent product lines such as 14th generation Meteor Lake) are based on the same design philosophy.
