Intel Core i7 1280P Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu vs. Clear Linux Performance

The web browser performance has tended to be one of the areas where Windows dominates, but interestingly with this Core i7 1280P testing on Chrome 103, both Ubuntu and Clear Linux held up well against Windows 11 for this MSI notebook.

Out of 118 tests carried out on all three operating systems, Intel's Clear Linux was in first place 56% of the time for this Core i7 1280P MSI laptop comparison. Windows 11 picked up wins just a quarter of the time.

While looking at last place finishes, it was evenly divided between Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Windows 11.

When taking the geometric mean of all the benchmark results, Clear Linux was about 7.6% faster than the Windows 11 pre-load on this MSI notebook. In turn Windows 11 was just about 1.5% faster than Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with the Linux 5.18 kernel. The one area where Windows 11 did the best and ahead of Linux was with the graphics performance, but hopefully Intel's Mesa+i915 driver developers will be working on some more Alder Lake / Gen12 optimizations in short order.

While Clear Linux was 9% faster than Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, it did lead to higher power consumption (around ~3 Watts on average for the SoC) and in turn also around 5 degrees higher CPU core temperatures during the course of all these benchmarks. (Unfortunately no Windows 11 comparison points year due to lack of PHP-PCNTL process control support for handling of the sensor monitoring in the background on a per-test basis.)

Those wishing to see all the benchmarks in full for this Intel Alder Lake P Windows vs. Linux comparison can see this OpenBenchmarking.org result page.