Intel P-State vs. CPUFreq Benchmarks On The i7-5960X

When it came to measuring the time to build the Linux kernel, the ACPI CPUFreq driver with performance governor was the fastest and did better than the P-State driver.

Oddly for C-Ray and building the Linux kernel, the P-State powersave mode was faster than the performance governor.

Audio encoding was greatly impacted by the various CPU frequency scaling drivers on the Linux 3.17 kernel.

More of these CPU frequency scaling tests can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org along with the other articles linked from the first page of this article. Overall, using the performance scaling driver is still certainly the best for those wanting to maximize the performance potential. Between P-State and ACPI CPUFreq there wasn't much of a difference except in some cases the CPUFeq driver did better than Intel's custom scaling driver.