AMD Core Performance Boost & Fast CPPC Land In Linux 6.11, Intel Lunar Lake Improvements

The power management updates have been merged for Linux 6.11 that include some nice improvements for Intel and AMD processors.

On the AMD side with the "amd_pstate" CPU frequency scaling driver for Linux 6.11 is the Core Performance Boost control support. This allows toggling CPB on a per-core basis for this feature to leverage the CPU core's boost frequency range / performance states. The AMD P-State driver also has Fast CPPC support merged as a power efficiency / performance-per-Watt improvement for some laptop SoCs to achieve slightly better results.

There are also various other AMD P-State improvements to find in the Linux 6.11 power management queue.

With the Intel P-State driver meanwhile is switching to the new CPU model define handling, updating the Meteor Lake EPP values, and adding Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake hybrid scaling factors. The updated Meteor Lake EPP value and carrying it forward to Lunar Lake should yield very nice improvements for power and efficiency and Intel Core Ultra laptops.

Also on the Intel side is out-of-band (OOB) mode for Intel Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" processors with the Intel P-State driver.

The power management updates also introduce the new Loongson 3 CPUFreq driver for helping with CPU frequency scaling for those Chinese processors.

See the power management pull for the full list of PM patches now merged for the Linux 6.11 cycle.

Linux power management maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel also submitted the thermal updates for Linux 6.11. Notable there is Lunar Lake platform support being added to the Intel int340x thermal driver. There is also Workload Type Hint support for Lunar Lake support in int340x.