AMD Ryzen 9 3900X cross-platform benchmarking shows the Windows 10 scheduler finally catching up to that of Linux

AMD initially denied any issues with the Windows scheduler during launch of the 1st gen Ryzens. However,  the company said during the Ryzen 3rd gen launch that Windows 10 version 1903 brings in better topology awareness, improved thread scheduling, and faster clock ramping that should help better utilizing the MCM design of the new chips. Phoronix decided to compare the performance of the 12C/24T Ryzen 9 3900X in Windows 10 1903 and Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS to see if things have really improved.

Phoronix's test bench comprised of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X running at stock speeds on an Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi motherboard, 2x 8 GB of DDR4-3600 RAM, a Corsair Force MP600 PCIe Gen4 SSD, and AMD Radeon RX 560 graphics.  

We see that both the Windows 10 1903 and Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS systems were showing very close performance figures in most benchmarks. While some of the tests such as SVT-AVI1, OpenMP-threaded image editing, and LLVM compilation seemed to favor Linux, other benchmarks such as 7-Zip and FLAC audio encoding showed a significantly narrowed performance gap with Windows 10 1903 showing good leads in FFmpeg tests. 

IndigoBench, the test that spawned the whole scheduler debate, still seems to run faster on Linux as do other CPU-based rendering tests such as Blender 2.79. The gap is considerably narrow this time, though. Geekbench, too, seemed to favor Linux albeit by a small margin. Windows, however, managed to lead in browser benchmarks. 

Overall, we see that Ubuntu managed an 8% lead over Windows 10 in CPU-based tests. The important takeaway from these results is that Windows 10 has finally managed to shrink the performance deficit by good measure when compared to Linux thanks to Ryzen-specific improvements in version 1903. It will be interesting to see how the upcoming Theadripper 3000-series with even higher core counts would fare in these tests.

Check out all the test scores in the Source link below.