Testing for better hybrid performance requires you to own an Intel Lakefield system. If Microsoft improved thread scheduling on 64-core Threadrippers, you need a 64-core Threadripper to find out. It is impossible to explore every single nook and cranny of an operating system in a few hours (or even a few days). One reason Microsoft probably doesn’t want people mucking around with an early, leaked version of its OS is that it opens the door for people to draw conclusions based on incomplete data. If what you care about is the long-term nuts and bolts, maybe so. If Windows 11 helps x86 PCs run at lower power consumption because it pushes workloads to the small cores the way macOS does, is that a huge upgrade? If what you care about is mostly UI and the visual look and feel of the OS, maybe not. I’m not certain that Windows 11 is a “huge upgrade” because ultimately, that term is in the eyes of the beholder.
Windows 7, when it debuted, was generally seen as “Vista, but done right.” Windows 10 may have similarly benefited from comparisons to Windows 8/8.1, an OS that is not known for its passionate and devoted user base. The question then becomes: What’s a “major change?” Windows XP SP2 looked virtually identical to Windows XP outside of a few specific places, but it incorporated a wide range of security improvements. There’s always some lag time between the introduction of new features and when those features become practical and useful for virtually any user.
When Intel and AMD introduce new SIMD instruction sets, it takes time to update software to support them. DirectX 12 had only an incremental impact on game development. But this is the nature of new technological improvements. It’s true that these gains might only show up if you own a hybrid CPU, and right now, that’s very few people. It’s five percent that hardware engineers didn’t have to scrape out of their own work. The gains are modest, mostly in the 2-7 percent range, with one 11 percent outlier, but even a five percent performance improvement is a genuine uplift in this day and age. I’m not taking a stance on whether Fossbytes is correct, but we’ve now seen data showing that Windows 11 is faster than Windows 10 when tested on hybrid CPUs.