Windows 11 improves the performance of big.LITTLE x86 CPU

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A few days ago, after the leak of the Windows 11Build 21996.1, Hot Hardware conducted a new test to find out the changes made to the Windows 11 scheduler and how it can cope with Intel’s upcoming Big-Bigger Alder Lake CPU. It is worth mentioning that AMD’s next-generation Ryzen processors may also be expected to adopt big.LITTLE’s hybrid architecture design.

Since Alder Lake has not yet been released at the time of the test, the test team used Samsung Galaxy Book S equipped with Lakefield Core i7-L16G7. And compared the Windows 11 build 21996.1 mentioned above with the Windows 10 21H1 to check the performance difference of the new operating system.

The results show that, depending on the workload, performance has improved significantly; browser performance seems to have also been greatly improved:

Geekbench runs a variety of short-threaded tests and has seen a moderate performance improvement in the multi-threaded (MT) test, and scores even lower in the single-threaded (ST) test.
Cinebench, which tested the rendering performance of Cinema 4D, saw a moderate improvement when all cores were fully loaded, but the improvement was more obvious in ST load. Because the workload jumps between cores and is more affected by scheduler input.

Also tested graphics workloads in the form of 3DMark Night Raid, a lightweight DirectX 12 benchmark test. Hot Hardware said this is a test they think Windows 11 will crash. Because 3DMark relies heavily on drivers, and the drivers on the Galaxy Book S are not suitable for this operating system. Nevertheless, it ran and completed the test on its integrated Intel UHD graphics without any obvious problems.

It turns out that this is also the only test that saw performance degradation in Windows 11. However, Hot Hardware said that the test results are very close, and in the case of less than 1%, it is more inclined to call it a tie.


Finally, it ran PCMark 10 to test the CPU and GPU at the same time, aiming to simulate real PC usage scenarios. PCMark 10 is a very difficult test to measure performance in a variety of real environments, including video conferencing, word processing, video, and image editing, and spreadsheets. But because of testing a variety of different workload types, the results were mixed.

As mentioned by Neowin, although it is still the early stage of Windows 11, overall, the results are indeed optimistic.

Next, with more available hardware and further updates, perhaps you can see more improvements.

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