cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/linux/t/646160
With currently reviewing the HP Z6 G5 A workstation powered by the new 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX Zen 4 processor, one of the areas I was curious about was how well HP’s tuned Microsoft Windows 11 compares to that of Linux.
20% is a LOT. That’s probably because of the random shit that nobody ever asked for but windows is always doing in the background anyway. Building a search index, windows update (which consumes an insane amount of CPU for a completely unreasonable amount of time sometimes), other individual updater services (because there can’t be one program that updates everything because every vendor does their own proprietary bullshit to handle updates), compressing and sending all you personal data to microsoft and of course the pre-installed McAffee (on trial license) that works hard to make your system less secure (that HP probably installed for you because apperently you haven’t paid enough money for the computer, so you must pay with your patience and your privacy as well). Depending on the benchmark, the pathetic legacy file system windows uses might also play a role.
No, it’s because the windows scheduler literally cannot handle that many cores. it simply does not know how to allocate work effectively.
The Windows scheduler is so stupid chip manufacturers manipulate the BIOS/ACPI tables to force it to make better decisions (particularly with SMT) rather than wait on MS to fix it.
Linux just shrugs, figures out the thread topology anyway and makes the right decisions regardless.
I have to use Chocolatey, Winget, Windows Store and invididual updating to use the tools I need in Windows, It’s ridiculous. I only use Flatpak and Zypper in my Linux partition.