Intel FRED Can Yield Greater Performance - FRED Benchmarks On Panther Lake
From the graphics/gaming benchmarks done with the Panther Lake laptop, there wasn't too much of a performance difference observed out of the Arc B390 performance. In some select cases such as the Unvanquished open-source game, the performance did appear lower, but may be other factors at play as there was also higher run-to-run variance exhibited.
The web browser performance in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome saw no significant performance difference with FRED enabled.
The improved performance is nice to see as it's on top of all the other Panther Lake performance metrics shown to date, due to the current non-default enabling, such as in the recent Benchmarking 18 Years Of Intel Laptop CPUs: Panther Lake As Much As 95x The Speed Of Penryn.
These benchmarks demonstrate Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED) delivering on its design goals. For I/O heavy workloads and other scenarios there were extremely meaningful performance gains provided by this new technology debuting with Panther Lake. While database servers and the like are less likely to be run on laptops, FRED on Panther Lake is great for edge devices and also looking ahead to FRED with next-gen Xeon Diamond Rapids server processors. The one puzzling factor is FRED being disabled by default with at least Linux for now. Hopefully that out-of-the-box change is made soon to provide better Linux performance on Intel Panther Lake. I haven't run into any major regressions or other problems in my Panther Lake FRED testing thus far so if there are any defects hopefully they are addressed soon to allow for the default change, but I haven't seen any recent FRED patches on the Linux kernel mailing list that would suggest any recent deficiency. In any case, FRED is exciting and great to quantify the performance impact on the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 hardware. Also importantly is that there was no significant change in CPU power consumption when FRED was enabled. From this initial testing, FRED is looking quite good for Intel (and AMD) CPUs moving forward. [Update: Patch Posted To Enable Intel FRED By Default On Linux]
If you enjoyed this article consider joining Phoronix Premium to view this site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. PayPal or Stripe tips are also graciously accepted. Thanks for your support.