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

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 13 August 2018 at 04:08 PM EDT. Page 1 of 4. 54 Comments.

Complementing the extensive Linux benchmarks done earlier today of the AMD Threadripper 2990WX in our review (as well as on the Threadripper 2950X), in this article are our first Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks of this 32-core / 64-thread $1799 USD processor. Tests were done from Microsoft Windows 10 against Clear Linux, Ubuntu 18.04, the Arch-based Antergos 18.7-Rolling, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

When receiving the Threadripper 2 review launch kit, included with the bundle was a Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe SSD and on there was a fresh Windows 10 installation setup by AMD. When seeing that, prior to wiping that, I ran some benchmarks of that Windows 10 Pro Build 17134 setup and compared it to a few Linux distributions on this same system while maintaining the hardware's configuration and BIOS settings.

The Windows 10 vs. Linux tests were done out of opportunity with having that Windows installation around without giving it too much thought, but on this 2990WX launch-day it's been surprising to see some of the performance results from some of the Windows publications. Had I known how poorly Windows 10 works on current high core count NUMA environments under some workloads, I would have certainly ran more benchmarks. But that will come in another article then as well as possibly looking at the Windows Server 2016 vs. Linux performance on the 2990WX to see if Windows behaves better there for this NUMA box. So treat this as the introductory article and more Windows vs. Linux benchmarks will be on the way as time allows.

Throughout this benchmarking the hardware was maintained the same of using the Threadripper 2990WX at stock speeds with the ASUS ROG ZENITH EXTREME motherboard, Cooler Master Wraith Ripper heatsink, 4 x 8GB G-SKILL DDR4-3200MHz memory, 500GB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics.

Each of the operating systems were tested in their out-of-the-box state for seeing the representative performance of each operating system as defined by the OS vendor. Do note that this does differ a bit compared to this morning's Threadripper 2 Linux reviews where all of the Intel/AMD CPUs were tested while on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS but with upgrades to the Linux 4.18 kernel, GCC 8.2 as the code compiler with "-O3 -march=native" flags, performance governor, etc. The out-of-the-box state of the Linux distributions tested today were:

Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS - The Linux 4.15 kernel, GCC 7.3.0, and CPUFreq ondemand as the main components worth noting for the benchmarks ran today.

Clear Linux 24200 - The Intel-developed open-source Linux distribution that is aggressively tuned for performance and is presently on the Linux 4.17 kernel, GCC 8.2 code compiler, and defaults to CPUFreq performance among other out-of-the-box tuning.

Antergos 18.7-Rolling - The Arch-based Linux distribution with Linux 4.17, GCC 8.1.1, and defaults to using CPUFreq with the scheduler utilization "schedutil" governor.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - The rolling-release flavor of openSUSE with the Linux 4.17 kernel, GCC 8.1.1, and CPUFreq ondemand.

Windows 10 vs. Linux - AMD Threadripper 2990WX Performance Benchmarks

All of these benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible environment using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


Related Articles