Ondemand vs. Performance CPU Governing For AMD FX CPUs On Linux 3.17
NAS Parallel Benchmarks is one of the common Phoronix benchmarks for CPU tests since it's heavily appreciated by the scientific community. Between ondemand and performance governors, there was no difference in the performance.
There also wasn't much difference in the operating temperature or system power draw. The CPU utilization is maxed out and the scaling driver is sending the FX-9590 to the top performance state regardless of ondemand vs. performance.
With Dolfyn and GraphicsMagick, more common CPU focused tests, for the FX-9590 there was no difference in performance.