Linux's P-State Performance Governor Shows Unexpectedly Big Boosts For The Intel Core i9-11900K

Out of the 156 benchmarks ran, here is a look at the overall peak CPU frequency recorded during the entire duration of benchmarks. As mentioned at the start of the article, without going to P-State performance we weren't seeing the ~5.3GHz clock frequency -- or at least not being reported by P-State.

For the entire duration of tests, the average Core i9 11900K power consumption went from 97 Watts to 133 Watts. Or looking at the 91st percentile with the default powersave governor was around 290 Watts while with the performance governor jumped to around 340 Watts. The peak power consumption though with the governor change led to a peak of 383 Watts (during the Kvazaar H.265 video encoder) out of this CPU that carries an official TDP of 125 Watts.

The CPU core temperature average was 64.4 degrees, up to 53.7 degrees.

And the geometric mean of all the raw benchmark results put the governor change at about 9% faster overall. So if you don't mind the power/thermal impact, the P-State performance governor is providing an abnormally larger boost than normal for this Rocket Lake processor.

Those wanting to look through all 150+ benchmarks in full plus seeing all the clock/power/thermal data for each individual result can see this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.