AMD released last Thursday (9) its new driver "AMD P-State", which arrives with the goal of achieving higher performance per Watt, as well as greater energy efficiency in Linux when compared to the conventional ACPI CPUFreq driver. Currently, the driver is limited to AMD Ryzen 5000 Series (Zen 3) processors.
The new driver is the result of a partnership between AMD and Valve, something that was announced during the X.Org Developers Conference 2021 event, where it was revealed that both companies were working together to come up with a new performance scaling design for CPUs OMG.
"This new engine is based on Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC), which allows for more precise frequency management than legacy ACPI P-State," explains Rui Huang, AMD. "The new AMD P-State comes to replace the ACPI P-state controls, as well as allowing a flexible, low-latency interface for the Linux kernel to directly communicate performance requests to hardware."
Furthermore, according to Rui Huang, the new driver should take advantage of the current "governors" for CPUs present in the Linux kernel, including schedutil and ondemand, to manage requests that are provided by CPPC hardware functionality. Also, according to the developer, in the future more CPU models should support the new driver, which includes Zen 2 processors (like the Steam Deck CPU).
More technical details can be found in the official announcement, clicking here.
