AMD Ryzen AI & Intel NPU Drivers Adding New Power Features With Linux 7.2
Last week's drm-misc-next pull request of new Direct Rendering Manager and accelerator driver feature material destined for Linux 7.2 include some new power management control features both for the AMD Ryzen AI and Intel NPU drivers.
The AMDXDNA accelerator driver for Ryzen AI NPUs is adding new "low" and "medium" power modes. The low mode enables clock gating and sets the dynamic power management level to the lowest level possible. Medium also enables clock gating and sets the dynamic power management level to half. This is part of the effort to conserve power and deliver greater energy efficiency for AMD's NPU.
Separately, the Intel NPU driver also has some new power management bits for Linux 7.2. The Intel NPU driver will now allow artificially limiting the NPU frequency. There is a configurable frequency limit for the NPU to constrain the power and thermal management. Via sysfs the NPU minimum and maximum frequencies can be set as well as reading the hardware's optimal frequency for best energy efficiency. That functionality was covered more in a prior Phoronix article: Intel NPU Linux Driver To Allow Limiting Frequency For Power & Thermal Management.
With this pull request, there is also a change in the Intel IVPU accelerator driver maintainer-ship for the NPU code. Maciej Falkowski is departing from his current position at Intel but there is another Intel engineer that will be stepping up as co-maintainer to the Intel NPU driver.
The drm-misc-next pull from last week also adds more panel support to the code, including for the WaveShare 7, Novatek NT35532, Startek KD070HDFLD092, ChipWealth CH13726A AMOLED, Team Source Display TST070WSNE-196C, and Displaytech DT050BTFT-PTS. The sysfb DRM drivers have also added power management support to allow suspend/resume handling.
See this pull request for the full list of drm-misc-next changes now ready for Linux 7.2.
The AMDXDNA accelerator driver for Ryzen AI NPUs is adding new "low" and "medium" power modes. The low mode enables clock gating and sets the dynamic power management level to the lowest level possible. Medium also enables clock gating and sets the dynamic power management level to half. This is part of the effort to conserve power and deliver greater energy efficiency for AMD's NPU.
👁 Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen AI laptops
Separately, the Intel NPU driver also has some new power management bits for Linux 7.2. The Intel NPU driver will now allow artificially limiting the NPU frequency. There is a configurable frequency limit for the NPU to constrain the power and thermal management. Via sysfs the NPU minimum and maximum frequencies can be set as well as reading the hardware's optimal frequency for best energy efficiency. That functionality was covered more in a prior Phoronix article: Intel NPU Linux Driver To Allow Limiting Frequency For Power & Thermal Management.
With this pull request, there is also a change in the Intel IVPU accelerator driver maintainer-ship for the NPU code. Maciej Falkowski is departing from his current position at Intel but there is another Intel engineer that will be stepping up as co-maintainer to the Intel NPU driver.
The drm-misc-next pull from last week also adds more panel support to the code, including for the WaveShare 7, Novatek NT35532, Startek KD070HDFLD092, ChipWealth CH13726A AMOLED, Team Source Display TST070WSNE-196C, and Displaytech DT050BTFT-PTS. The sysfb DRM drivers have also added power management support to allow suspend/resume handling.
See this pull request for the full list of drm-misc-next changes now ready for Linux 7.2.