Improving Open-Source ATI Power Management

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Improving Open-Source ATI Power Management

Red Hat's Matthew Garrett has chronicled his AtomBIOS hacking adventures on his blog that has led to aggressive power management capabilities. By using an AtomBIOS program written by Jerome Glisse to manipulate the clock frequencies, the previously-published R500 documentation, and coding, and he managed to save 10 Watts of power with a Radeon X1300...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Njg2Mg

[Louise]

Power management is really the one thing I would require before I would move away from the closed source drivers.

I have a passive cooled GPU/IGP, and I think it would die, if it was tuned on full 24/7 like my computer is.

[bugmenot]

Not on X1300 but on X1900. Please fix asap.

"My current desktop PC has an RS790-based Radeon on-board graphics controller. It also has a Radeon X1900 plugged in."

"Unless you have an X1300, in which case it's known to break and what were you thinking running this code you crazy mad fool."

[mycroes]

Besides the obvious error about the card that got the power-savings, it's also how he did it... Matthew used some code from Jerome's tool, but he had to adapt it because it wouldn't work. Also Matthew has a nice conclusion in his blog post about bringing this kind of power management without reducing performance, which is just as interesting as the fact that he managed to save some power...

Quite dissapointed in the quality of this article to be honest, let's hope it's a one-time mistake.
Regards,

Michael