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AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Power/Performance With CPU Frequency Scaling Driver Tunables

Continuing on with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series Linux benchmarking, today's testing is looking at the performance and power impact of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X when adjusting the CPU frequency scaling driver, governor, and Energy Performance Preference (EPP) tunable to help look at the performance and power efficiency characteristics of this current flagship Zen 5 desktop processor. Installing Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or most other modern Linux distributions on the AMD Ryzen 9000 series will yield the AMD P-State EPP CPU frequency scaling driver being used and the 'powersave' CPU frequency scaling governor and on most platforms at least will be using the 'balance_performance' Energy Performance Preference.

Additionally, for reference are benchmarks if falling back to the older/generic ACPI CPUFreq driver in its schedutil and performance governor modes. For this article on the Ryzen 9 9950X running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the Linux 6.10 kernel the following CPUFreq driver / governor / EPP configurations were tested: These benchmarks are mostly for reference purposes for providing some insight what modifications may be desired by those aiming to achieve greater performance or power efficiency on new Ryzen 9000 series desktops running Linux.

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