A Look At The Windows vs. Linux Scaling Performance Up To 64 Threads With The AMD 2990WX

7-Zip file compression was yet another case where the SMT-enabled Threadripper 2990WX saw slightly lower performance on Windows but that was also the case too on Linux in this particular workload. Linux scaled much better yielding a 5.5x improvement with 32 threads over 4 threads while Windows Server 2019 yielded a 3.92x difference.

With the Stockfish chess engine benchmark was one of the cases where the 64-thread SMT configuration on Windows came out ahead of the 32-thread results. Stockfish was scaling nicely on both operating systems and meant a 9.0x increase from 4 threads to 64 threads for Windows and an 8.0x improvement on Linux, but Linux was consistently delivering better raw performance.

In the Primesieve prime number benchmark is another case where the Windows 64-thread performance was lower than 32-threads while the Linux performance was close to the same. Both operating systems yielded a 6.2~6.4x improvement in scaling over the course of the tests run.

With FFmpeg the performance only scaled up to about 12 threads and ended up being slower at the higher thread counts. On Windows was another case where having SMT enabled led to significantly lower performance on the Threadripper 2990WX.