Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Scaling Governor Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 22 April 2018 at 12:54 PM EDT. 24 Comments
AMD
With this week's Ryzen 5 2600X + Ryzen 7 2700X benchmarks some thought the CPUFreq scaling driver or rather its governors may have been limiting the performance of these Zen+ CPUs, so I ran some additional benchmarks this weekend.

Those launch-day Ryzen 5 2600X / Ryzen 7 2700X Ubuntu Linux benchmarks were using the "performance" governor, but some have alleged that the performance governor may now actually hurt AMD systems... Ondemand, of course, is the default CPUFreq governor on Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions. Some also have said the "schedutil" governor that makes use of the kernel's scheduler utilization data may do better on AMD. So I ran some extra benchmarks while changing between CPUFreq's ondemand (default), performance (normally the best for performance, and what was used in our CPU tests), schedutil (the newest option), and powersave (if you really just care about conserving power).
Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Tests were done via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org.
Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

In the few graphical tests, the performance governor performed the same as ondemand and schedutil... While obviously powersave led to the slowest performance.
Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

And in the CPU tests, performance tended to be the best or at worst was in line with ondemand and schedutil.
Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

I did not find any situation where using the performance governor led to worse performance.
Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Nor did Schedutil end up being a magic bullet.
Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

Ryzen 7 2700X CPUFreq Testing

More AMD Ryzen 7 2700X Linux benchmarks via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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