Benchmarks: Excellent Power Efficiency With 5th Gen AMD EPYC Using amd-pstate & Power Profiles
When taking the geometric mean of the raw performance across 50+ different workloads, the modern default on Linux 6.13+ of AMD P-State performance was about 2% faster overall than the prior default of ACPI CPUFreq. A little bit of uplift at large and not at all bad considering all of the original AMD EPYC 9005 series benchmarking was done with the ACPI CPUFreq driver. When tuning for efficiency with the Balanced Memory Power Profile and powersave governor with EPP performance bias, there was still 97.8% the performance of the new default configuration.
The energy efficiency tuning with achieving 97.8% the performance of the AMD P-State performance default becomes very interesting when looking at the combined AMD EPYC 9755 CPU power consumption. That tuned configuration led to the EPYC 9755 2P power consumption at 92% the power of AMD P-State or 87.8% the power consumption on average of the ACPI CPUFreq performance default. That equates to a very nice improvement in EPYC Turin efficiency without losing much on the raw performance side.
The CPU power reduction also equated to slightly lower CPU core temperatures.
Lastly is a look at the peak CPU clock frequency observed during the entire duration of the testing.
For those wanting to maximize the efficiency of AMD EPYC 9005 series servers, the Balanced Memory Power Profile is quite interesting when paired with the new AMD P-State driver default. It's certainly worth exploring and evaluating for your particular workloads if really concerned about achieving the peak performance-per-Watt without sacrificing performance. The results of ACPI CPUFreq vs. AMD P-State drivers also continues to look very good for those running an up-to-date kernel in production. Further benchmarks looking at these tunables on more AMD EPYC 9005 series hardware will be coming up in future articles on Phoronix.
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