This Is What Started AMD's Open-Source Strategy

[pingufunkybeat]

But can anyone explain to me why the power management is such a freaking pain?

Because users expect maximum performance with the minimum power consumption. It's easy to clock the card up or down, but to clock it up or down just the right amount that it uses little power, and the user does not notice anything, that's a lot of optimisation, and it has to be implemented all over the driver.

[bridgman]

It's easy to clock the card up or down

That's kinda what we were thinking going into the project (it was supposed to be one of the easier parts, not even mentioned in anyone's plans), but it didn't work out that way

[V!NCENT]

Because users expect maximum performance with the minimum power consumption. It's easy to clock the card up or down, but to clock it up or down just the right amount that it uses little power, and the user does not notice anything, that's a lot of optimisation, and it has to be implemented all over the driver.

Given that I am a user, I'm expacting from AMD:
-Efficient hardware amount of calculation per wattage (nothing to do with software);
-Clock speed based on load. I'm expecting low resource consumption when using my 3D desktop, while a neckbreaking clockspeed when doing load intensive stuff like gaming;
-My fan to rotate at constant speeds for a while, because if it doesn't do that, then I keep noticing that it runs all the freaking time.

I also expect three performance modes to block the GPU from sucking my battery dead;
-Power saving (enough for desktop usage);
-Balanced (automatic switching between power saving and performance when needed);
-Performance (always working for me at the highest possible speed);

I want my laptop to be Balanced when not below 1/7th of the battery and Power saving once it hits the 1/7th mark. My desktop should always be balanced.

Performance is for when I want my PC to be responsive at all times.

[bridgman]

Yep, and IIRC this is pretty much what you get from the proprietary driver (which is what "comes from AMD") although I don't know if it automatically switches to a more miserly mode as the battery level drops.

In the open source driver (which "comes from the community with help from AMD") there's still a lot of work to be done.

[Qaridarium]

default=low/med. What Q and some others want.

this is not what i want. i want automatic dynamic but in the past i don't understand why the "mid" profile isn't default
but now i know it because some cards do not have a mid profile.
and for the "low" profile there are well known unstable bugs for some cards and performance problems for basic stuff and so one and so one.

in my point of view its just a wrong hardware design because if you build hardware in the right way you don't need software do do automatic dynamic power management.

[AnonymousCoward]

Yep, and IIRC this is pretty much what you get from the proprietary driver (which is what "comes from AMD")

But the proprietary driver doesn't do suspend-resume, which is kind of an essential feature for a laptop. So whatever driver you choose, you're screwed one way or another.

In the open source driver (which "comes from the community with help from AMD") there's still a lot of work to be done.

Ditto for the proprietary driver.

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=135
http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=153
http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=199

[pingufunkybeat]

Given that I am a user, I'm expacting from AMD:
-Efficient hardware amount of calculation per wattage (nothing to do with software);
-Clock speed based on load. I'm expecting low resource consumption when using my 3D desktop, while a neckbreaking clockspeed when doing load intensive stuff like gaming;
-My fan to rotate at constant speeds for a while, because if it doesn't do that, then I keep noticing that it runs all the freaking time.

I also expect three performance modes to block the GPU from sucking my battery dead;
-Power saving (enough for desktop usage);
-Balanced (automatic switching between power saving and performance when needed);
-Performance (always working for me at the highest possible speed);

I want my laptop to be Balanced when not below 1/7th of the battery and Power saving once it hits the 1/7th mark. My desktop should always be balanced.

Performance is for when I want my PC to be responsive at all times.

See, now you understand why it's difficult.

Dynpm already does what you expect in the free driver.

Now it only needs several million lines of code to do it better.

[V!NCENT]

See, now you understand why it's difficult.

No I don't, because most of that list is exposing a power profile option. KDE/Gnome/whatever can read the battery and expose a switch widget so that these two can tell the driver what needs to be done.

What the driver should be able to do is:
-Recognise chip;
-Know its capabilities;
-Translate this knowledge to clocking.

Dynpm already does what you expect in the free driver.

I don't know why it's making my fan scream all the time. At least with Fedora 15 KDE spin (yum upgraded). But either Fedora or 'RadeonFLOSS' or a bit of both are doing it wrong.

Now it only needs several million lines of code to do it better.

Look, I would like to have semi-perfect/perfect power management, but I'm satisfied if it would just largely work and devs would focus to improve much needed stuff in other areas.

While I can totaly live without accelerated video, I'm guessing it would be better for my batterylife is it was accelerated and thus having a much bigger improvement in power consumption.