A Look At Where The P-State Linux Driver Does Bad Against CPUFreq, Clear Linux Tests

I'm still running more benchmarks in investigating the Core i5 7600K Linux performance and with even its graphics performance being slower than Skylake. I fired up Clear Linux on this Kaby Lake system this weekend and it's indeed faster than Ubuntu, though there still is some sort of fundamental issue at play with these new CPUs on Linux. But what is clear is that there are cases where the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver does perform very poorly over the mature, generic CPUFreq scaling driver.

I'll have more Kaby Lake i5-7600K benchmarks with Clear Linux in the days ahead while this Sunday are just some reference tests. There are numbers with Clear Linux compared to my earlier data with a Core i5 6600K (Skylake) on Ubuntu and Core i5 7600K (Kaby Lake) on Ubuntu. The i5-7600K was tested with the default P-State powersave mode and then with CPUFreq. Clear Linux uses the ACPI CPUFreq driver by default with the performance governor, even on newer Intel CPUs and while most other Linux distributions use P-State where supported.

So it's just a little comparison this weekend while more data is still being worked on. This is mainly for looking at CPUFreq vs. P-State with the i5-7600K.

For this comparison too, looking at the relative performance of the other systems to the i5-7600K on Clear Linux.

Clear Linux also carries other optimizations too besides changing the default CPU frequency scaling driver/governor.


It is a shame though the i5-7600K vs. i5-6600K performance currently out-of-the-box on Ubuntu.

You can see more relative numbers via this OpenBenchmarking.org magic or also look at the raw data.

The benchmarks continue...