AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Power/Performance With CPU Frequency Scaling Driver Tunables
Aside from a few exceptions, there overall wasn't much change out of changing the various EPP settings and CPU frequency scaling governor on this Ryzen 9 9950X desktop or from switching to the old/generic ACPI CPUFreq driver. The results overall were quite stable -- though not really surprising as typically it's with the mobile platforms where the power/performance settings have a more pronounced difference. Those wanting to see all 111 benchmarks I ran in full for this comparison can do so via this result file.
Taking the geometric mean of all 111 benchmarks showed the performance overall to be effectively flat.
The CPU power consumption is shown over the entire ~10 hour benchmarking span per configuration. When running in amd-pstate-epp powersave with the balance_performance EPP -- the default on Ubuntu Linux and many other modern distributions -- was the lowest CPU power consumption on average. ACPI CPUFreq with the performance governor was surprisingly in second place. Going from the AMD P-State EPP powersave to performance configuration on the Ryzen 9 9950X was a difference of a 140 to 146 Watt average.
Here's also a look at how the CPU peak frequency observed changed across the various modes for the entire span of benchmarking. It is important to note that if still running on the older ACPI CPUFreq generic CPU frequency scaling driver the Zen 5 desktop CPU never clocked below 3.0~4.2GHz for its peak frequency compared to all the AMD P-State EPP runs successfully going down to 600MHz during the brief idle periods.
There was no real difference in the CPU core temperature observed for the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X across these different runs.
This wasn't the most exciting benchmarks recently nor as dramatic as when testing CPU frequency scaling drivers/settings on either thin embedded / laptops or larger servers, but nevertheless hopefully this data was useful to you if you were wondering about the AMD P-State EPP tuning impact with a modern AMD Zen 5 desktop on Linux.
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