SQL Server 2016 includes several performance improvements that help it run faster than previous versions:
1. Automatic Soft NUMA partitions workloads across NUMA nodes when there are more than 8 CPUs per node to avoid bottlenecks.
2. Dynamic memory objects are now partitioned by CPU to avoid contention on global memory objects.
3. Redo operations can now be parallelized across multiple tasks to improve performance during database recovery.