Further Exploring The Intel Tiger Lake Core i7-1165G7 Performance On Ubuntu Linux

The web browser performance on the Tiger Lake laptop was also much better at this point on Ubuntu 20.10 and indeed hitting the rated turbo frequencies, but with this Dell XPS 13 9310 it can mean running browser benchmarks and seeing the core temperature hit in the 90s.

So the single-threaded performance is better on Ubuntu 20.10 (albeit more power and thermal, obviously), but what about the multi-threaded workloads regressing?

This round with the sensor monitoring enabled showed that under the multi-threaded workloads, the average peak clock frequency is a few hundred megahertz lower on Ubuntu 20.10... Thus the lower performance. In multiple tests the exposed Intel RAPL power interfaces show the i7-1165G7 spiking as high as 60~75 Watts. Wondering at first if those high power measurements were an anomaly or some miscalculation with the Intel RAPL power interfaces, those massive spikes did correlate to a sharp rise in the separate CPU core temperature monitoring driver too.

But long story short, the better Ubuntu 20.10 power behavior for Tiger Lake is helping the single-threaded workloads but hurting the multi-threaded workloads.

The CPU package power consumption went from around a 14 Watt average on Ubuntu 20.04.1 + Linux 5.9 to 21 Watts on Ubuntu 20.10. The peak CPU power reported went from 38 Watts to 72 Watts.

Where as initially the Tiger Lake thermal performance on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with the Dell XPS 9310 was looking quite good and never peaking too high, with Ubuntu 20.10 it was now able to hit in the 90's and saw an average temperature under load of 69 degrees.