AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT CPUFreq Governor Comparison With Linux 5.9

One of the most frequent questions received at Phoronix in recent times is whether the "schedutil" governor is ready for widespread use and if it can compare in performance to, well, the "performance" governor on AMD Linux systems. Here are some benchmarks of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT using the latest Linux 5.9 development kernel in looking at the performance differences between the CPUFreq governor options of Ondemand, Powersave, Performance, and Schedutil.

Schedutil is the CPUfreq governor making use of the Linux kernel's scheduler utilization data in an effort to make more informed decisions about increasing/decreasing the CPU performance state / frequency. Schedutil is often looked at as the future of CPU frequency scaling governors and on the Intel side with the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver has already appeared in some scenarions as the default on recent kernel versions.

For this testing it's quite straight-forward and looking on the desktop side not only how schedutil compares to the performance governor but also powersave and ondemand for the Ryzen 9 3900XT. As it's a desktop system, just the raw performance is being looked at rather than the power consumption as well. From an AMD Renoir notebook I'll have similar tests soon where obviously the power efficiency is also quite important and will be included there.

This testing is quite straight-forward so let's get on to this latest data with Linux 5.9. Benchmarks via the Phoronix Test Suite.