Windows 11 gives hybrid CPU architectures a performance boost

A couple of weeks ago, it was rumored that Intel's Alder Lake would launch alongside Microsoft's new operating system because the latter has a new process scheduler that improves performance for hybrid CPU architectures. Alder Lake is the first mass-market product from Intel to feature a big.LITTLE-like architecture, with a combination of high-performance cores and energy-efficient cores.

The leaked Windows 11 build allowed HotHardware to test the performance difference. The site compared the performance of Intel's Core i7-L16G7 "Lakefield" processor on Windows 10 21H1 and the leaked Windows 11 version. Lakefield was Intel's first processor with a big.LITTLE-like design.

The site found that in a variety of tests, there's a relatively big performance gain. It's not massive of course, but quite decent for a software upgrade. In Geekbench, single-core performance enhances by 2 percent, while multi-threaded performance gets a 5.8 percent boost. Similarly, performance is over 10 percent higher in Browserbench Speedometer 2.0. 3DMark Night Raid performance on the other hand is about 0.5 percent lower -- basically pretty much a draw.

While the inner machinations of Windows are an enigma for most people, we have a theory as to what's going on here in our test results. Our working theory is that Microsoft has put in a lot of work for Lakefield, perhaps in anticipation of Intel's Alder Lake, with respect to the Windows scheduler. Remember that the Core i5-L16G7 represents Intel's first crack at focused cores for performance and power efficiency. Up until then, such things only existed on Arm64. With Alder Lake set to launch later this year, we think that the Galaxy Book S is perhaps an early benefactor of efforts to ensure that Intel's new hybrid architecture lives up to its full potential.