AMD Announcements From CES 2020: Ryzen 4000 Mobile Series, Radeon RX 5600 XT

[nuetzel]

What do you think? - Will we see 3980X anytime?

[bridgman]

This is why Linux will never be a success on the desktop. People don't care about power consumption at all, which means we will never cope with global warming (instead fueling it) and never outperform Windows/macOS at battery life.

If it helps, I think you are getting flamed only because you picked a high end Renoir rather than one of our lower power chips, eg the 6W part we supply for Chromebook systems, to compare to your Atom system for power consumption.

[agd5f]

This is why Linux will never be a success on the desktop. People don't care about power consumption at all, which means we will never cope with global warming (instead fueling it) and never outperform Windows/macOS at battery life.

Sadly, Windows is better at power consumption. My Vega card under Windows uses 2-3W when doing nothing (with a desktop), while Linux uses 6W when doing nothing, in the console!

Chicken and egg problem. Linux is 1% of the desktop market, most companies working on Linux invest far more than that, but to deliver the same level of feature support as windows you need an equivalent sized investment.

[tildearrow]

Adding "amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff" to Linux kernel's command-line can potentially lower GPU's power consumption, if you don't happen to have it on the command-line yet. Setting ppfeaturemask can bring about other problems though.

Maybe the clock gating info in /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/amdgpu_pm_info can be compared to its equivalent in Windows, but unfortunately I do not know how to obtain such information in Windows.

I tried doing so. No changes at all (still around 5-6W).
However, it did go down a bit in the console (to 3-4W).

Here's my PM info:

Clock Gating Flags Mask: 0xfe97cf
       Graphics Medium Grain Clock Gating: On
       Graphics Medium Grain memory Light Sleep: On
       Graphics Coarse Grain Clock Gating: On
       Graphics Coarse Grain memory Light Sleep: On
       Graphics Coarse Grain Tree Shader Clock Gating: Off
       Graphics Coarse Grain Tree Shader Light Sleep: Off
       Graphics Command Processor Light Sleep: On
       Graphics Run List Controller Light Sleep: On
       Graphics 3D Coarse Grain Clock Gating: On
       Graphics 3D Coarse Grain memory Light Sleep: On
       Memory Controller Light Sleep: On
       Memory Controller Medium Grain Clock Gating: On
       System Direct Memory Access Light Sleep: On
       System Direct Memory Access Medium Grain Clock Gating: Off
       Bus Interface Medium Grain Clock Gating: On
       Bus Interface Light Sleep: On
       Unified Video Decoder Medium Grain Clock Gating: Off
       Video Compression Engine Medium Grain Clock Gating: Off
       Host Data Path Light Sleep: On
       Host Data Path Medium Grain Clock Gating: Off
       Digital Right Management Medium Grain Clock Gating: On
       Digital Right Management Light Sleep: On
       Rom Medium Grain Clock Gating: On
       Data Fabric Medium Grain Clock Gating: On

GFX Clocks and Power:
       167 MHz (MCLK)
       72 MHz (SCLK)
       1269 MHz (PSTATE_SCLK)
       800 MHz (PSTATE_MCLK)
       806 mV (VDDGFX)
       6.0 W (average GPU)

GPU Temperature: 36 C
GPU Load: 0 %

SMC Feature Mask: 0x0000000009a1ff4f
UVD: Disabled

VCE: Disabled

I did notice that some of the clock gating flags are off...

[tildearrow]

Disable the window compositor in GNOME/KDE/XFCE/etc. The XFCE compositor for example increases idle power consumption by a factor of 2.5 on RX 570.

No thanks, because... Then how does Windows achieve 2-3W with compositing (DWM) on?

(Also, disabling KWin and using Openbox instead does not show any improvement, but rather a regression!)

(post scriptum: It's now at 7W in the console :< (and yes, with ppfeaturemask))