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dijittoday at 12:59 PM3 repliesview on HN

I doubt it.

There’s three possibilities.

1) Intel is optimising for common cases inside the most dominant desktop operating system.. this is like apple having really good floating point in their cpu’s that makes javascript not suck for performance… and is why macbooks feel snappy with electron.

2) Intel and microsoft worked together when designing the CPU, so Windows is able to take advantage of some features that Linux is only just learning how to handle (or learning the exact way it works).

3) The way the operating systems schedule tasks is better in this generation for Windows over Linux, by accident.

“it’s better” doesn’t really factor, Windows has been shown repeatedly over the last half-decade to be so inferior as to be beaten by Linux when Linux is emulating Windows APIs. It’s difficult to be so slow that you’re slower than someone emulating your platform.


Replies

dartharvatoday at 1:36 PM

Neither of your three possibilities refute the parent hypothesis:

> Or maybe it is just better?

show 1 reply
richardwhiuktoday at 1:02 PM

It’s easy to be better when you only implement the mainline of the API

show 1 reply
nimbiustoday at 1:15 PM

"Intel is optimising for common cases inside the most dominant desktop operating system."

- literally the history of Intel for more than 30 years and likely why we see this benefit now. gaming the compiler and hoping they wont get caught bought them a decade against AMD.

"Intel and microsoft worked together when designing the CPU"

- I guess the bitterness of Itanium doesnt last forever.