Intel P-State vs. CPUFreq Benchmarks On The i7-5960X

Written by Michael Larabel in Software on 18 September 2014 at 02:10 PM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 11 Comments.

Continuing in our recent CPUFreq vs. P-State scaling driver benchmarks, here's some tests from the eight-core Core i7 5960X Haswell-E system as we test the two CPU frequency scaling drivers and their different governors.

The other recent tests we've done with the Linux scaling drivers have been for Ondemand vs. Performance governing for AMD FX CPUs, scaling tests with AMD's Kaveri, and CPUFreq vs. P-State on Linux 3.15. In this article we're testing with Intel's newest $1000+ desktop CPU, the Core i7 5960X.

Testing was done with the Intel Core i7 5960X at stock speeds. The Linux 3.17 Git kernel atop Ubuntu 14.10 was used for this round of testing. The Core i7 5960X has eight physical cores plus Hyper Threading, 3.0GHz base frequency, and 3.5GHz turbo frequency (that's the reported difference in the system information table due to P-State advertising the turbo frequency where as CPUFreq just reports the base frequency).

The powersave and performance governors were tested with the P-State driver and for ACPI CPUFreq there is ondemand, conservative, and performance governors. All of these benchmarks were carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite. In previous articles we also included system power consumption metrics while for this article are just the raw performance figures, so checkout the earlier articles if you care just about minimal power use.


Related Articles