AMD Ryzen 9 7950X P-State/CPUFreq Frequency Scaling Performance On Linux

Starting things off with the very common web browser tests, we see right away that the amd-pstate schedutil combination used by default on the likes of Ubuntu 22.04/22.10 yield the lowest performance -- worse raw performance in the web browser tests than using acpi-cpufreq ondemand as what formerly was the common default for AMD CPUs.

Even when it came to performance-per-Watt on the Ryzen 9 7950X, the amd-pstate schedutil configuration yielded poor power efficiency with the acpi-cpufreq ondemand configuration yielding the best performance-per-Watt in both Firefox and Chrome.

Within the more demanding Jetstream 2.0 browser benchmark, there was less variation between the tested options while the performance governor led to a slight lead.

When looking at the peak CPU frequency obtained while running Jetstream 2, the amd-pstate schedutil behavior at times can be rather odd and unlike the other tested configurations with sticking to a much lower peak frequency.

For WebAssembly benchmarks too, amd-pstate schedutil as the default on Ubuntu and other distributions was in last place.

Using acpi-cpufreq ondemand/schedutil was yielding slightly lower power consumption rates too than amd-pstate schedutil.