Intel Core Ultra 9 285K “Arrow Lake” Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance

One of the areas for benchmarking exploration that I had been meaning to dive into since the launch of the Intel Arrow Lake processors back in October was checking out the Microsoft Windows 11 vs. Linux performance for the new Core Ultra 9 285K flagship processor. Particularly with the mix of P and E cores I was curious for a fresh look at the Windows vs. Linux performance capabilities. With recently carrying out a Windows 11 install on Arrow Lake for running the Intel Arc B580 Battlemage Windows vs. Linux benchmarks, following that I carried out some fresh CPU benchmarks for seeing how Arrow Lake processor performance is looking on these competing operating systems.

With the Intel Arc Battlemage Windows vs. Linux graphics benchmarks out of the way, today’s article is diving into the Core Ultra 9 285K Windows vs. Linux performance. This was looking at the out-of-the-box performance of Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 24H2 up against Ubuntu 24.10 Linux for the default performance on clean installations. Plus in the case of Ubuntu 24.10 with the open-source flexibility I also ran some additional benchmark runs of different configurations.

For all of this testing the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K at stock speeds was used with the 2 x 16GB DDR5-6400 memory, ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z890 HERO motherboard with the latest BIOS, and WD_BLACK SN850X 1TB NVMe SSD storage.

The following configurations were tested for today’s article:

– Microsoft Windows 11 Professional 24H2 with all Windows updates and drivers as of 15 December.

– Ubuntu 24.10 out-of-the-box with Linux 6.11 and updates as of 17 December.

– Ubuntu 24.10 when upgrading to the Linux 6.12 stable kernel.

– Ubuntu 24.10 when upgrading to the current Linux 6.13 development kernel.

– Ubuntu 24.10 when using the Linux 6.13 development kernel and switching over to the Intel P-State “performance” governor rather than the default intel_pstate powersave mode.

With the flexibility of Ubuntu Linux, the newer kernel tests were done for looking at the Linux 6.12 LTS performance and how the Intel Arrow Lake performance on the newest upstream kernel is looking as we roll into 2025 especially with Intel software engineers continuing to better work on optimizing the Intel Core hybrid performance.

Let’s take a look at how the Intel Core Ultra 9 “Arrow Lake” is competing under Windows and Linux.

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