#POWER MANAGEMENT CPUINFO DRIVERS#
#POWER MANAGEMENT CPUINFO FULL#

Using the conservative governor results in behavior that is closer to what I saw in 12.04 with the ondemand governor, but may over-compensate in the other direction (cores tend to stay at 1.4 GHz even when there's moderate load). So I guess the obvious thing to do would be switch to the conservative governor? I definitely noticed a difference in both noise and heat after doing it.

#POWER MANAGEMENT CPUINFO FULL#

You'll most likely be fine with the Asus defaults, though undervolting certainly helped my average power use and kept peak voltage down substantially running the numbers on an online TDP calculator, it thumped it down to ~100 watts under full load.

It still might be worth applying here just to ensure good behavior. From my personal experience it made a significant difference in games that thumped plural CPUs hard, but outside of that use case it didn't affect too much. My guess is that it downloads them as part of a firmware bundle and applies them early in the kernel boot process.

#POWER MANAGEMENT CPUINFO DRIVERS#

Typically yes, though if you check the Additional Drivers utility in 16.04 (and at least the two prior versions, IIRC) you'll find AMD microcode updates squirreled away. What firmware are you talking about? Microcode patches? Isn't that something that is normally handled by the BIOS/EFI? * Are you running the latest AMD firmware for the CPU? I know it wasn't installed and running by default in 14.04. With more emphasis being placed on real-time performance lately, it would not surprise me if they've gone down this path. If so, this is good from a latency standpoint for anything requiring quick CPU response, but kind of sucks for power management. While this is still a relatively unscientific experiment, based on this I am starting to suspect that the 'on demand' CPU governor got re-tuned between 12.04 and 14.04, and now tends to keep more cores in higher power states. Slightly higher (but still trivial for an 8-core CPU) system load all cores now at 2.1 GHz. Negligible system load 3 of the cores have throttled down, but one is running at full speed, and 4 are at intermediate clock speeds. Top right window is sysmon2, a system health monitoring script I wrote which shows CPU power usage (as reported by the CPU power monitoring feature on recent AMD CPUs) and core clocks, among other things. Top left window is the built-in top command. These are after killing Chrome, Amarok, and JACK. I took a couple of screenshots of what I'm talking about.

If I left the system sitting idle for a couple of minutes, I would see up to half of the cores drop down to 1.4 GHz for short periods of time, but the rest would remain at elevated clocks. After killing Chrome, Amarok, and JACK, those events disappeared (as expected) however, it did not have a huge effect on CPU clocks. With one browser window and Amarok open (but not playing), powertop indicated that Chrome and the JACK audio stack were generating a lot of events - hundreds per second - even though system load was quite low. Now that you mention it, I've heard of the tool before, but it had slipped my mind. It is an intel maintained tool, but it will work on AMD CPUs as well. Try powertop ( ) to see if can find anything that is not allowing the CPU to reach idle.

Power management cpuinfo