CPUFreq Scaling Tests With AMD's Kaveri On Linux 3.16

Moving onto more processor-focused tests, the Ondemand, conservative, and performance governors were operating close to the same when running the x264 video encoding workload while the powersave governor led to the performance being about halved.

This also led to a lower performance-per-Watt for the powersave governor.

With x264 the powersave governor led to an average power consumption rate of 61 Watts while the other governors led to a system power use around 80 Watts and peaking near 100 Watts.

Those wishing to see more of this CPUfreq governor data can find more of these benchmark results via 1408143-KH-CPUFREQDR92 on OpenBenchmarking. Feel free to run your own tests with the Phoronix Test Suite.

For this AMD A10-7800 Kaveri system the power consumption was lowered noticeably by the power-save governor with the CPU frequency being locked to its lowest stepping while the performance and power differences between ondemand and performance (and largely conservative too) tended to be not too noticeable with the variety of benchmarks used in this article.

Besides using the powersave governor, you can also lower the Kaveri APU power consumption via AMD's Controllable TDP.