Using PowerTOP 2.6 Saves Power, Extends Battery Life On Ubuntu 14.04

With the LAME MP3 encoding performance the Core i7 3517U was slower with the Linux 3.15 kernel, but that may be due to that Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA kernel using the Intel P-State performance CPU scaling driver rather than ACPI CPUfreq ondemand with the stock Linux 3.13 kernel.

On the stock Ubuntu 14.04 kernel the power consumption dropped from 19.6 Watts to 17.1 Watts for this single-threaded audio encoding benchmark thanks to PowerTOP. While the Linux 3.15 kernel was slower for running LAME, its stock power consumption was 17.0 Watts and with the PowerTOP power optimizations it dropped to 14.8 Watts

When looking at all of this power data that was automatically and reliably recorded by the Phoronix Test Suite while running these various benchmarks and its many periods of idling, there's still a clear win for PowerTOP on Ubuntu 14.04 Linux when using the year-old ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32VDA with Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" processor.

With the stock configuration of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the average power consumption dropped from 25.6 Watts to 22.9 Watts, a savings of about 10% on the battery. The peak power draw dropped from 34.6 Watts to 32.0 Watts. The low points of the power consumption when the system was idling went from 12 Watts to 10 Watts. These power-savings happened without regressing the Linux system performance at all. Long story short, PowerTOP is still a powerful open-source Intel utility for extending your battery life on Linux x86.

If you like all of this Linux hardware testing at Phoronix, consider a premium subscription or PayPal tip to allow for similar future articles. Those wishing to find out other Linux power-saving tips should see this article from earlier in the week and the resulting recommendations.