New Intel "Adaptive" P-State Frequency Governor Volleyed For Better GPU-Bound Efficiency

The Intel P-State driver has been going through a number of improvements recently including transitioning to the "Schedutil" governor by default on some systems so far in this governor making use of scheduler utilization data. But Intel's graphics team meanwhile has been working on P-State changes to improve the GPU-bound energy efficiency and that is now spun as a new "adaptive" governor.

Intel open-source developer Francisco Jerez has for several months been working on P-State improvements to improve the iGPU-bound performance and efficiency. This work can lead to around ~15% performance boosts and up to ~43% perf-per-Watt advantages on Intel systems with onboard graphics. This relates to similarly how Intel P-State powersave can be better than performance for iGPU systems due to the split power envelope between the CPU cores and HD/UHD/Iris Graphics.

Francisco Jerez today published his latest work on GPU-bound energy efficiency improvements for the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver. With the new patches, the work is being exposed as a new "adaptive" governor rather than modifying the behavior of existing governors. This adaptive governor would be encouraged for Intel Linux users often encountering iGPU-bound workloads.

The patch-set is still being revised but could stand chances of being merged to Linux 5.8 if this latest review goes well. We'll see and with time will run some benchmarks on this P-State adaptive option for better Intel iGPU performance on Linux.