According to Phoronix.com Intel Linux engineer Srinivas Pandruvada sent out a patch that fine-tunes the Energy Performance Preference (EPP) value within the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.
The ACPI EPP value, ranging from 0 to 255, indicates the balance between processor power and performance preferences. Back in February, Intel adjusted the Meteor Lake EPP from 128 to 115 in the default “balance_performance” mode. However, it seems this value didn’t quite hit the sweet spot.
Today’s one-line patch is a game-changer. It bumps the EPP value from 115 to 64, resulting in impressive gains in both performance and power efficiency.
With the revised EPP value, the Intel Meteor Lake processor shows remarkable improvements across various benchmarks:
- Speedometer Web Browser Benchmark: A 19 per cent boost.
- WebXPRT 4 Browser Benchmark: A solid 12 per cent improvement.
- 3DMark Wild Life Extreme: Enhanced by three per cent.
- Geekbench Multi-Threaded Test: Up by two per cent.
- Power Efficiency Matters
- Notably, the performance-per-watt also sees significant gains:
- 11 per cent improvement in 3DMark Wild Life.
- Six per cent enhancement in web browser benchmarks.
The patch fine-tunes the balance_power EPP value, resulting in substantial power savings:
Video playback power consumption was reduced by a staggering 52 per cent.
Microsoft Teams video conferences now consume 35 per cent less power with the adjusted EPP.
This magic tuning isn’t just for show. It optimises Intel Meteor Lake SoCs with the P-State driver. The hope is that these patches will be merged for Linux v6.11 or even earlier. And there’s more: Intel Arrow Lake will follow the same new EPP defaults as Meteor Lake.