Intel Core i9 12900K P-State Governor Performance On Linux

First up were some Firefox and Chrome web browser benchmarks that tend to be rather sensitive to CPU frequency scaling driver/governor changes.

With JetStream 2.0 in Mozilla Firefox, moving from the default p-state powersave to the performance governor did increase the score by 16%. However, using Schedutil lowered the performance sharply...

Though the performance governor did - as expected - run up the CPU power consumption... While close to a 30 Watt average overall for this lightweight browser benchmark, the peak CPU power consumption spiked from around 85 Watts (or 78 Watts with Schedutil0 to over 103 Watts when using the performance governor with either intel_cpufreq or p-state.

It was a similar story with other browser benchmarks on Firefox and Chrome...

While on the AMD side the Schedutil governor tends to be the default on modern distributions, on the Intel side it tends to perform rather poorly and much worse than P-State powersave -- just not for Alder Lake but other hardware tested in the past as well.

In some benchmarks like the JavaScript Kraken test, the performance governor didn't provide measurable benefit but it was Schedutil as the outlier with its much lower performance.