Linux 6.5 With AMD P-State EPP Default Brings Performance & Power Efficiency Benefits For Ryzen Servers

For most of the benchmarks carried out, the performance was unchanged for this AMD Ryzen 9 7900 series server platform when going from Linux 6.4 to Linux 6.5 as it pertained to the raw performance.

But when looking at the CPU power consumption on a per-test basis, on Linux 6.5 with the AMD P-State EPP driver there is periods of time where the processor is consuming less power than Linux 6.4 with ACPI CPUFreq -- both when using the performance governor or the respective default governors.

Code compilation times saw little difference overall but at least slight benefits to the CPU power consumption -- lower minimums and on average saving about 1 Watt on Linux 6.5 for this Ryzen 9 7900 while not being any slower.

Where things became much more interesting were in some of the more variable workloads like with Apache Hadoop. Out-of-the-box Hadoop performs much better on Linux 6.5 than Linux 6.4 and prior when sticking to the defaults. When overriding it with the "performance" governor, the raw performance was similar. It was great to see the out-of-the-box AMD P-State EPP + powersave configuration nearly matching the performance governor results in the Hadoop runs.

Not only was Hadoop running faster with the default configuration on Linux 6.5 but it was pulling less power on average than Linux 6.4! With the performance governor there was obviously not as much of a difference.

The out-of-the-box configuration of the Ryzen 9 server on Linux 6.5 yielded the best performance-per-Watt of the tested configurations.

These improvements with the out-of-the-box AMD Ryzen server performance on Linux 6.5 were also observed across different Hadoop tasks and configurations as well.