The Importance Of Thermald On Linux For Modern Intel Tiger Lake Laptops

As it's a straight-forward on/off comparison, let's jump straight to a side-by-side look at all of the data:

As one can immediately see, Thermald for newer Intel systems like Tiger Lake notebooks is quite vital to achieving good performance. In extrme cases it can easily mean 20%+ better performance than if Thermald is simply missing or disabled from the system compared to its out-of-the-box state running.

In some cases Thermald did in fact hurt performance, which was primarily with the graphics/gaming tests. This isn't entirely surprising just like using P-State Performance with Intel CPUs sporting integrated graphics can lead to reduced performance compared to powersave. Due to the graphics and CPU cores sharing the same power envelope, Thermald tuning for CPU power/thermal performance can in turn limit/hurt the Xe Graphics.