Is Windows 11 22H2 Slower Than Windows 10 21H2 on a 12th Generation Intel Alder Lake CPU?
Channel: Jerry Travis Smith
Date: 2022-10-09

Windows 11 has a reputation for being slower than Windows 10. I’ve wondered if Windows 11’s Thread Director would perform better with Intel’s 12th Generation processors. Unlike previous Intel silicon, the 12th gen chips have Performance Cores and Efficiency Cores and the Thread Director is supposed to properly balance work loads to take advantage of this split architecture.

Luckily, I managed to get a very nice Lenovo Thinkpad T14 just in time for Windows 11 22H2’s release. The T14 shipped with Windows 10 Pro, so I ran some benchmarks to see how it faired with the elder Windows. Then, I upgraded the machine to Windows 11 Pro and ran the same benchmarks. The results were a mixed bag, with Windows 10 taking top honors in some tests while Windows 11 pulled ahead in others. Let’s look at the specifics.
Our Lenovo T14 has a 12th Gen Intel Core(TM) i5-1235U with 2 Performance Cores and 8 Efficiency Cores. This is paired with Intel Iris XE Graphics and 16 gigabytes of system RAM running at 3200 mhz. I ran all tests using the Balanced Power profile, since AnandTech reports that most of the Thread Director’s magic disabled when running on the Performance Power profile.
Importantly, my testing didn’t look at battery life, which is also something Intel has hyped regarding its 12th gen chips. I simply didn’t have the time to tackle that aspect of testing.

We’ll start with the Unigine benchmarks. Obviously, these tests are more graphically focused, but I feel they’re valuable to include given that the Iris XE graphics are highly touted by Intel. 

With its first win, Windows 11 is 3% faster in Unigine Heaven. On the other hand, Unigine Valley, was Windows 11’s biggest loss, with Windows 10 performing 28.4% better. This margin was so shocking I reran the test 3 times with a nearly identical result. Finally for Unigine, Superposition ran 4.3% slower on Windows 11.

Next up, here are the GeekBench 5 results. On the GPU benchmark, Windows 11 was 1.4% slower. On the GeekBench 5 Single Core test, Windows 11 was 9/10ths of a percent slower. On GeekBench 5 Multi Core, Windows 11 came out on top at 2.9% faster than Windows 10.

Our last two benchmarks come from PC Mark 10, where Windows 11 took the lead in both the Basic test and the Extended test, with a 2.9% and .5% advantage respectively.