Use Windows 11 for maximum speed on Intel’s new Alder Lake chips

Here’s a good reason to switch to Windows 11: Your laptop will not be able to take advantage of the full range of speed and battery features in Intel’s new Alder Lake processor without the latest operating system from Microsoft.

Windows 11 is coming October 5, at the same time of year as the first PCs using Alder Lake, Intel’s successor to its 11th generation “Tiger Lake” chips. Microsoft has adapted Windows 11 for the title feature of Alder Lake, a combination of performance and efficiency processing cores which respectively maximize speed and battery life. Specifically, Windows leverages Intel’s Thread Director hardware that examines computer tasks as they run to determine which core makes the most sense for each task.

Support for Thread Director enables Windows to more intelligently oversee the hundreds of computer processes, called threads, that modern computers are running simultaneously. It is as if a rail network operator plans traffic better by knowing the speed and size of each train.

“Windows 11’s thread scheduler is much smarter at dynamically choosing the most suitable core,” Mehmet Iyigun, partner development manager at Microsoft, said in a briefing in August. Such monitoring offers a “huge impact on perceived performance”.

Microsoft has not commented on the importance of Thread Director benefits.

The speed and efficiency gains provided by the combination of Windows 11 and Alder Lake could trigger an upgrade cycle for both companies, which are often reluctant to deploy upgrades, and consumers, who may hang on to laptops until a big technological breakthrough comes along.

The allure of performance improvements could help Microsoft convince reluctant customers to upgrade Windows instead of letting older versions linger for years. The long lifetimes of Windows XP and Windows 7 over the past decades have resulted in issues such as unpatched security vulnerabilities and incompatibility with new software.

If you have a work-supplied laptop, your employer’s technical decisions affect you, and better performance and battery life are benefits any IT manager can appreciate.

” In the business, [Thread Director support] could be an accelerator for the adoption of Windows 11, ”said Techsponential analyst Avi Greengart. Businesses might also appreciate the security, manageability and productivity improvements of Windows 11, he added.

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Based on its observations, Thread Director provides guidance to the operating system on high priority tasks for performance cores and lower priority background tasks that can be assigned to efficiency cores. He re-evaluates his conclusions with changes such as the arrival of new tasks or the end of an older task.

Windows 11 also improves the way software installed on a computer communicates its needs to the operating system, which can improve performance. Windows already had a programming interface that the software could use to request more resources for better performance. In Windows 11, software can now tell when it wants to conserve battery power, preferring efficiency over performance.

One app that will take advantage of the efficiency option is Microsoft’s own Edge browser, Iyigun said.

Intel is working with Linux programmers to add support for Thread Director to this operating system, the company said.