AMD has been on a roll over the past year making significant strides in power management across the Linux stack.

Most of this work is centered around support for p-state.

To take advantage you should run a newer Linux kernel. Here are some of the improvements from each recent release:

Use power-profiles-daemon 0.20+ which sets the appropriate p-state driver based on the selected battery profile.

Upcoming changes:

Kudos to AMD principal engineer Mario Limonciello for driving these changes across the board!

This is one advantage of increased competition (e.g. from the Apple M series); the entire ecosystem is pushed forward.

I am personally benefiting immensely from these improvements on my new Thinkpad t14s with AMD 7840U (battery life going from 4-5 hours to easily 10+ hours).

Finally we don’t have to settle anymore for underwhelming battery life on Linux laptops :)

  • supermairOP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    Yes, Zen 2 and above support p-states! You might need to update your bios and enable CPPC if p-state is not showing up.

    You can confirm by running $ powerprofilesctl and seeing if CpuDriver is amd_pstate.

    • poinck@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      9 months ago

      Thx, I will try that. When configuring my kernel I saw it and left it in the default config “active” (I was upgrading to the latest LTS kernel today). I did not check how I can interact with it as a user, yet.