AMD Renoir Running Smooth On Linux 5.10

After last week sharing some Intel Tiger Lake benchmarks on Linux 5.10, the tables have turned and here are some similar tests when running Linux 5.10 on an AMD Ryzen 4000 series "Renoir" notebook.

Using a Lenovo IdeaPad with Ryzen 5 4500U with Ubuntu 20.10, I ran some benchmarks of Linux 5.9 stable against the Linux 5.10 development snapshot of the time.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite dozens of benchmarks were run in comparing these latest kernel versions.

Notable in switching to Linux 5.10 on this laptop meant CPUFreq now deafaulting to the Schedutil governor by default rather than Ondemand as was the default on prior kernel versions.

With Schedutil being used by default on Linux 5.10, there were some changes in performance. The NCNN neural network Vulkan performance was mixed and rather noisy. Ignoring NCNN, GIMP seemes to have performed better on the Linux 5.9 kernel configuration. The other tests showed a few percent swings here and there.

Of 125 tests run, Linux 5.10 was the first place finisher 60% of the time regardless of the margin of the win.

But if taking the geometric mean of all 125 benchmark results, you can see the performance overall is quite close to that of Linux 5.9 even with Schedutil by default. There weren't CPU power measurements for this article since the amd_energy driver isn't currently working for Renoir but will work on such tests with the WattsUp Pro soon.

Long story short it was a smooth experience for this AMD Ryzen 5 4500U notebook on Linux 5.10. All 125 test results can be seen on OpenBenchmarking.org. There are many Linux 5.10 features and improvements but not much specifically for benefiting Renoir. Linux 5.11 should be a bit more interesting for AMD notebook users with the AMD SFH driver and AMD SoC PMC driver for mainline.