Facepalm: Microsoft is as soon as once more aggressively pushing customers to maneuver from Home windows 10 to Home windows 11. This time, the Redmond agency is boasting that the newer OS is as much as 2.3x sooner than its predecessor – however fails to say its deeply flawed testing methodology.
Tech giants aren’t famend for his or her honesty and openness. In the case of making claims and pointing to benchmarks, it is not simply Nvidia that performs quick and free with the reality.
With Home windows 10’s October 14 end-of-life date approaching quick, Microsoft is publishing articles seemingly each different day to persuade customers to replace to Home windows 11. Within the newest weblog, Govt Vice President and Client Chief Advertising and marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi writes that Home windows 11 is 2.3x sooner than Home windows 10.
The determine comes from Geekbench 6 Multi-Core benchmark scores – Microsoft used only a single artificial take a look at for this declare – however this hyperlink (aka.ms/w11claims) buried within the footnotes accommodates an fascinating part.
“Primarily based on testing carried out by Microsoft in December 2024 utilizing Geekbench 6 Multi-core rating evaluating a collection of Home windows 10 PCs with Intel Core Sixth, eighth and tenth technology processors and Home windows 11 PCs with Intel Core twelfth and Thirteenth technology processors.”
FYI: Through the years, TechSpot has benchmarked Home windows 11 vs Home windows 10 a number of instances. The first time was in 2021, after which once more with variations of gaming checks and CPUs right here, and right here, and final time was in 2024.
So, Microsoft determined the easiest way to indicate off how a lot sooner Home windows 11 is than 10 wasn’t to check each on the identical programs. As a substitute, it ran Home windows 11 on Intel machines from 2022 to 2024, and Home windows 10 on Intel laptops between seven and 9 years previous.
For comparability, the weakest gadget Microsoft used within the Home windows 10 take a look at was an Intel Core i3-6100U CPU, a 2-core/4-thread chip constructed on the 14nm course of. The closest Thirteenth-gen equal, the Core i3-1315U, has six cores and eight threads, can turbo as much as 4.5GHz, and is constructed on the Intel 7 (10nm) course of. Its IPC efficiency is estimated to be as much as 3 times higher than the Sixth-gen chip.
Microsoft does add the disclaimer that “efficiency will fluctuate considerably by gadget and with settings, utilization and different components,” however most individuals aren’t going to see it, and the two.3x sooner declare in the principle put up is shockingly deceptive.
The fact is that Geekbench 6 scores for each working programs on the identical machine could be nearly an identical, however a weblog titled “a lot older {hardware} is slower than newer {hardware}!” is unlikely to ship many Home windows 10 holdouts operating to Home windows 11.
Microsoft provides some legitimate the reason why shifting to Home windows 11 may very well be an excellent factor, and lots of video games typically run sooner on the newest OS, however deceptive claims like this one aren’t doing its improve push any favors.
