Intel’s new Core Ultra 9 285K launched to a lukewarm reception due to its middling performance, but switching to Linux could fix that. Compared to Windows 11 with the 24H2 update, the 285K ran 6% better on average on Ubuntu 24.10, the latest version according to Phoronix. Upgrading the Linux kernel to 6.13 pushed the 285K just a bit further, running 8% faster using this combo of Ubuntu 24.10 and Linux 6.13.
Looking closer at the individual benchmarks reveals that the 285K struggles with a few things on Windows. The top-end Intel CPU coped poorly with rendering, ray tracing, compression and decompression, encoding, Java, and sometimes chess simulators in particular. In one encoding test using the SVT-AV1 program, the 285K was nearly twice as fast on Ubuntu than it was Windows, and many other benchmarks showed double-digit percent performance gains when going over to Ubuntu.
