A Look At The Windows 10 vs. Linux Performance On AMD Threadripper 2990WX

Linux tended to perform faster than Windows with the Minion constraint solver, but the Microsoft OS did come out ahead in the Solitaire sub-test.

Blender is one of the fun tests that can really pound the 2990WX across all 64 threads. With this pts/blender test profile the official Linux/Windows binaries from Blender.org are what are automatically used for benchmarking. Here we see all four tested Linux distributions offering significantly better rendering times than the Windows performance. (These Windows numbers also jive with what was seen when checking a few Windows publications where the same Blender scenes were used.)

Long story short, the Linux performance in a majority of these CPU-focused benchmarks were running much faster on the AMD Threadripper 2990WX than Windows 10 Pro when tested with the same hardware in the same configuration. Then again, we usually see better performance with Linux over Windows on most hardware but not always to some of the extremes encountered. It will certainly be interesting to run more Windows vs. Linux tests on the 2990WX Threadripper platform moving forward.

What did also come as a bit of a surprise was the openSUSE Tumbleweed performance often being the front-runner. Intel's Clear Linux tends to always perform the best out-of-the-box even with most AMD platforms, but this time around the rolling-release Tumbleweed was really shining. Though it is worth noting that historically SUSE/openSUSE has always worked well on AMD hardware. SUSE and AMD have a long working relationship from SUSE developers often being responsible for the GCC optimizations/enablement of new AMD microarchitectues, AMD originally funding SUSE to develop the "RadeonHD" open-source AMD Linux graphics driver, SUSE having done the HSA/compute work on LibreOffice, and many other collaborative projects over the years.

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