Unexpected Surprise: Windows 11 Outperforming Linux On An Intel Arrow Lake H Laptop
When seeing the CPU renderer results like for V-RAY and IndigoBench I was very taken back and surprised to find Microsoft Windows 11 outperforming Ubuntu Linux. This never happens in my experience short of some apparent system trouble/bug. And with being proprietary software am just relying on the official Linux and Windows binaries, thereby ruling out any toolchain differences explaining the disparity. In the cases of Indigo and V-RAY having blessed benchmark modes from the software vendors make for easy reproducibility/testing.
But as it stands now after about two months of investigations at Lenovo and Intel and I running various other benchmarks (CPUfreq changes, Thermald differences, trying newer non-LTS Ubuntu releases, etc), the outcome is unchanged and the Linux performance appears inline with their expectations. The CPU power consumption of the Core Ultra 7 255H was inline with expectations under Linux as well for the rated values albeit I didn't have the capability to monitor under Windows due to monitoring/threading differences there with my benchmarking.
Even so with Windows coming out faster, the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8 has proven over the past two months to be quite an ambitious performer between its Arrow Lake H processor and NVIDIA RTX Pro graphics -- just that it's surprisingly coming in shy of the Windows 11 performance. In the coming days I'll have up my review on the laptop itself under Linux.
For those wondering how this laptop with the Intel Core Ultra 7 255H on Linux stacks up against other Ubuntu Linux laptop combinations, see these comparison benchmark results done on Ubuntu 25.04 from a wide range of Intel Core and AMD Ryzen laptops at Phoronix.
It will be interesting to see in 2026 if this is a one-off occurrence or part of a bigger trend of Windows 11 becoming more competitive with Linux or if it's the more complicated consumer hardware ecosystem/platforms posing optimization challenges on Linux. If anyone has seen similar experiences recently of Windows 11 coming out faster than Linux, I'd certainly be interested in hearing via the forums or email as well. Regardless, we'll see what 2026 holds for Windows vs. Linux performance on consumer hardware.
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