AMD Continues Working On SmartShift Support For Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Continues Working On SmartShift Support For Linux

Announced last year by AMD was SmartShift Technology for laptops with both AMD CPUs and GPUs to allow dynamically shifting the power budget between the CPU/GPU depending upon the current workload. AMD promoted SmartShift as delivering up to 14% extra performance and now this technology is being worked on for their Linux driver...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-SmartShift-Linux-Still-Come

[edwaleni]

"Hey Harry, can you dim the lights over there, the neighbors are trying to run Call of Duty in 4K on their Ryzen and can't get enough juice"

[stormcrow]

[schmidtbag]

"Hey Harry, can you dim the lights over there, the neighbors are trying to run Call of Duty in 4K on their Ryzen and can't get enough juice"

Hah, that would be DumbShift

[cynical]

AMD Advantage is really amazing. I’m reading the new Radeon GPU is so well power gated that you can get 10 hours of video playback on one of these high end gaming laptops.

The main reason I always went for thin and light designs was for the better battery life, so if I can finally get something similar in a more powerful system… well let’s just say it is tempting.

[grigi]

AMD Advantage is really amazing. I’m reading the new Radeon GPU is so well power gated that you can get 10 hours of video playback on one of these high end gaming laptops.

The main reason I always went for thin and light designs was for the better battery life, so if I can finally get something similar in a more powerful system… well let’s just say it is tempting.

I have an MSI Alpha 15, and battery life is really good indeed. Although the gating on battery is usually turning off the dGPU and running everything off the iGPU.
I just wish suspend/resume worked better on the new ryzen laptops, everything else is working just fine.

[Jabberwocky]

My daily driver 2500U has not given me any problems but updates like these get me excited about upgrading.

Thank you AMD for supporting Linux!

[mazumoto]

Oh, that's surprising - I thought I read somewhere that SmartShift does not need any software changes. But apparently that's not really the case. As an owner of the first (and only?) SmartShift Laptop that was released in 2020, the Dell G5 SE, I'm quite happy that they're working on it, though it's unfortunate that it takes so long.

[sarmad]

How does the AMD dGPU work in those all AMD laptops? Is the dGPU only used when setting PRIME=1 and is there a copy operation from dGPU to iGPU before the image is finally sent to the screen, or is there a way to have the dGPU connected directly to the display? Also, what about external monitors?

[agd5f]

How does the AMD dGPU work in those all AMD laptops? Is the dGPU only used when setting PRIME=1 and is there a copy operation from dGPU to iGPU before the image is finally sent to the screen, or is there a way to have the dGPU connected directly to the display? Also, what about external monitors?

It depends on the OEM. Sometimes the dGPU has no display connectors attached to it and it's used for render offload only. Sometimes, some of the display connectors on the laptop are attached to the dGPU. Sometimes the bios has an option to force a single GPU (e.g., just the APU or just the dGPU). Typically, the dGPU is used for rendering and then the rendered frame is copied to the APU for display.