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

The AOM-AV1 video encoder was also showing some nice improvements to the default Linux 6.5 performance on this AMD Ryzen 9 7900 + ASRock Rack server.

It was great seeing that the out-of-the-box performance with the powersave governor was capable of nearly matching the performance of the runs when forcing the "performance" governor.

It's great seeing AMD Ryzen (zen 2 and newer) systems finally defaulting to the AMD P-State driver rather than the long-used ACPI CPUFreq driver. Intel made this transition years ago already with their Intel P-State driver while over the past two years the AMD P-State driver that's tied to ACPI CPPC has been coming together nicely. I've looked extensively at the AMD Ryzen P-State benefits for desktop/laptop and gaming workloads in the past while it's nice to see the benefits for AMD Ryzen servers. With this AMD Ryzen 9 7900 + ASRock Rack server configuration tested, there were a number of workloads benefiting with better out-of-the-box performance. If you already switch to running with the "performance" governor the impact to the raw performance is understandably much less. Exciting as well was seeing the broad CPU power consumption benefits from using AMD P-State over ACPI CPUFreq.

Not part of Linux 6.5 but out on the horizon is also the AMD Preferred Core patches that will help with some workloads. I'll be testing the AMD Preferred Core patches for Linux on this AMD Ryzen server -- including with 3D V-Cache processors -- in a follow-up article on Phoronix.