AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U - Windows vs. Linux Performance

With the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 powered by the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U prior to blowing the default Microsoft Windows installation on the device I ran some benchmarks for seeing how the performance stacks up against various Linux distributions. Going up against Windows 11 on this AMD Zen 3 laptop were Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 35, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, and Arch Linux.

The Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen2 (20XF004WUS) being tested shipped with Windows 10 but on initial boot was quickly prompted for moving to Windows 11. So with that this Windows 11 testing on the installation configured by Lenovo was compared to Arch Linux in its latest rolling state as of earlier this month, Clear Linux 35400, Fedora Workstation 35, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, and Ubuntu 21.10 for seeing how the various operating systems compare in their default / out-of-the-box state on this current-generation Lenovo ThinkPad.

The ThinkPad T14s Gen2 was configured with the eight core / sixteen thread AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U with integrated Radeon (Vega) graphics, 2 x 16GB DDR4-4266 memory, 4K display panel, and 1TB Samsung NVMe solid-state drive. This laptop continues to prove to be a hell of a device especially if able to pick it up for a holiday special around $1299 USD but even at the current ~$1900 pricing would still prove to provide good value. See the prior benchmarks on this laptop for seeing how the 5850U performance stacks up against other Intel and AMD laptops.

A variety of real-world workloads that are native to Windows and Linux were used for this comparison. In this article just the raw performance across Windows and Linux is being looked at for dozens of different workloads. Thermal/power differences aren't being looked at due to Windows still lacking PCNTL support as needed by the Phoronix Test Suite for being able to concurrently monitor system sensors on a per-test basis as is done on Linux/BSD/macOS testing.

So let's move on and see how a current-generation AMD Ryzen laptop compares for Windows and Linux performance...