AMDGPU Linux Driver Seeing A Lot Of Power Saving Optimization Work

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMDGPU Linux Driver Seeing A Lot Of Power Saving Optimization Work

In addition to squaring away the Radeon RX 6000 series RDNA 2 support and promoting the Arcturus support for the new GPU found within the AMD MI100 accelerator, this month AMD open-source Linux driver developers have been devoting a fair amount of work towards power optimizations...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-Nov-2020-Power-Optimize

[treba]

This is great to hear Still waiting for the Tuxedo Pulse 14's we ordered for our dev team - and looking forward to see how they perform against the new M1 MacBooks our PMs ordered

[darkbasic]

Any news on VGA support for GCN DC? Can't wait to see amdgpu being the default.

[user1]

For older cards like RX 580, are there any performance benefits of running the latest kernel compared to something like 5.4?
After some distro hopping, I'm currently on Linux Mint 20 with kernel 5.4 and Mesa 20.2. Previously, I've tried numerous distributions with kernel 5.8, also with Mesa 20.2 and I would say I haven't noticed any performance difference between the two kernels when using the same Mesa version. I know there are some exceptions like kernel 5.4 itself which introduced LRU bulk moves that improved Vulkan performance, but other than that, I don't feel that regular kernel releases improve performance if hardware support is mature, like in the case of Polaris. I heard Polaris will receive some improvements like the fan stop feature with kernel 5.11, but there are no mentions of additional performance boosts.
Maybe AMD devs have to say something about it?

[baryluk]

Nice.

It would be really nice to have some precise tests of power usage by dGPU (measuring PCIe slot power and PCIe 6/8-pin cables), to see impact of these changes. I know devices to log this stuff is available and very accurate. I.e. Gamer Nexus reviews show this data.

[humbug]

Any news on VGA support for GCN DC? Can't wait to see amdgpu being the default.

I am waiting for this too.

[Azrael5]

Which drivers will provide these features?

[cl333r]

I haven't found "DCN", I found "GCN" [1], is this the same?

[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphi...cs_Core_Next_1

[Laughing1]

It is RDNA 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDNA_(...ecture)#RDNA_2

[Venemo]

I haven't found "DCN", I found "GCN" [1], is this the same?

[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphi...cs_Core_Next_1

No, they are not the same.
GCN (Graphics Core Next) is the name of the chip architecture, while DCN (Display Core Next) is the name of the display engine in the chips, which is the part that knows how to talk to displays (monitors, etc.).