Early Benchmarks: AMD EPYC 9005 Performance & Power Efficiency To Lead Further With Linux 6.13

With the ClickHouse database benchmarks, amd-pstate-epp performance was slightly faster than acpi-cpufreq performance while amd-pstate-epp powersave was similar or slightly slower than acpi-cpufreq schedutil but with superior performance-per-Watt.

With Blender 4.2 there was similar performance across all four tested configurations but around 20 Watt lower power consumption between the two EPYC 9755 processors... Again, not jaw-dropping on its own with each EPYC 9755 having a 500 Watt default TDP,. but across a fleet of EPYC Turin servers the power savings can add up and doesn't mean compromising performance.

With the Apache Cassandra 5.0 software the amd-pstate-epp powersave mode was slightly lower than the acpi-cpufreq schedutil configuration but yielding the best performance-per-Watt for this AMD EPYC 9005 series server.

From my testing thus far across dozens of workloads, the AMD P-State driver is working out very well on the EPYC 9005 series server processors. It's great to see AMD finally ready to make this default transition from ACPI CPUFreq to AMD P-State beginning with 5th Gen EPYC processors in the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle. For those wanting to try out AMD P-State on an EPYC server today, it's already possible on recent kernels using the "amd_pstate=" option.

The results I am seeing from AMD P-State on the EPYC 9005 processors is very encouraging. In not all workloads is there a quantifiable difference but with AMD P-State and the performance governor in some workloads it's showing even better performance than the performance governor with ACPI CPUFreq. The amd-pstate-epp with the "powersave" default is more interesting than the current ACPI CPUFreq "schedutil" default common to Ubuntu and other distributions. The amd-pstate-epp powersave mode was frequently yielding the best performance-per-Watt for this dual EPYC Turin server. In some cases the performance of amd-pstate-epp powersave was similar to the performance governors but with lower CPU power consumption.

These results are quite encouraging for the future of EPYC server processors with the AMD P-State driver. As the Linux 6.13 kernel development gets underway and an assortment of other features also set to be merged, I'll be back around with more benchmarks on the EPYC 9005 series. With the prior AMD EPYC 9005 benchmarks shown on Phoronix being done with ACPI CPUFreq, these new numbers are just icing on the cake with further performance and power efficiency wins for the EPYC 9005 series on the AMD P-State driver.