Linux 6.5+ Is Great For The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 / AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U

As shown already the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U works out well on Linux and is very speedy as shown with that prior benchmarking on Linux 6.3, but for those moving to Linux 6.5 or newer the performance and power efficiency is even better. Like for those moving to the newly-released Ubuntu 23.10 with Linux 6.5, there are some nice performance gains to find with this laptop -- similar to the experience seen with various AMD Ryzen desktops on the new kernel.

As shown in recent weeks like with the Ryzen 9 7950X on Linux 6.5 there is nice performance and power efficiency gains due to the upstream default change from ACPI CPUFreq to AMD P-State EPP (active) for Ryzen (Zen 2 and newer systems with ACPI CPPC support) systems. This also means increased wins for the likes of the ASUS ROG Ally with Ryzen Z1 Extreme as well as Ryzen server performance also benefiting. For helping to quantify the difference for Ryzen laptops, I ran some kernel comparison tests on the ThinkPad P14s Gen 4.

Tests were done on the latest kernels at the time that included Linux 6.4.16, Linux 6.5.5, and Linux 6.6 Git for comparing the out-of-the-box performance of this Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 under Linux. The same hardware was, of course, used throughout all testing (the CPU frequency difference in the system table amounts to ACPI CPUFreq vs. AMD P-State reporting differences) and was the Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U at stock speeds, 64GB of RAM, AMD RDNA3 integrated graphics, and a 1TB Kioxia NVMe SSD. The only change made throughout testing was switching the version of the Linux kernel running on this Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U notebook.