Meteor Lake EPP Tuning For Greater Performance Or Power Efficiency With Intel Ultra Core 7

With all of my initial Intel Core Ultra 7 155H benchmarking since last week from the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance to the integrated Intel Arc Graphics performance it was at the Linux 6.7 kernel defaults / OS defaults. But for those wanting to push the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H further for better performance or conversely wanting to extend the battery life further for devices like the Acer Swift Go 14 laptop, the Intel P-State Energy Performance Preference (EPP) can be adjusted. Here's a look at the sometimes significant difference to power and performance when adjusting the Intel Meteor Lake CPU between the default balanced performance mode and the alternative power saver and performance modes.

This round of testing is looking at the difference when switching between the Intel P-Stat EPP modes of power, balance_performance (the default), and the performance mode for the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake SoC with the Acer Swift Go 14 laptop. No other changes were made during this round of testing with the software stack still being Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.7 kernel.

On Linux the EPP value can be adjusted from the GNOME Settings or more universally via the command line when dealing with the sysfs interface directly. The EPP is used for expressing your desired power/performance mode whether the Intel performance state handling should favor power savings, a balance of power and performance, or go for all-out best performance. The default Intel P-State powersave governor was used throughout all of this testing with only looking at the Intel EPP impact on Linux.

During this EPP tuning benchmarks of the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, in addition to the raw performance the CPU/SoC power consumption and CPU core temperature were also monitored on a per-test basis for helping to quantify the benefits of the Energy Performance Preference adjustments.