Arch Linux

Jost

Member

Registered: 2025-04-10

Posts: 1

amd P-state power control

Hello everyone. This is my first discussion on the forum, if I am doing something wrong, please do not close the discussion, but point out the errors if any.

Previously, I used a laptop with an i5 6300u and was able to keep the total power consumption at an average of 7 watts. I recently purchased a laptop with an r5 5600u and came across an amd p-state, using power-profiles-daemon did not give any positive results in adjusting power consumption. Judging by what I was able to read about amd, the p-state regulates power consumption itself depending on the processor load. I also noticed that periodically the processor frequency often jumps from the minimum set in the 1.1 GHz system to 4.2 GHz. I tried to reduce power consumption by lowering the frequencies, but when starting any load, the consumption still remained maximum.

The next question is, is it possible to set power consumption limits for the processor (necessary to increase the battery life of the laptop)?

apaz

Member

Registered: 2018-07-23

Posts: 122

Re: amd P-state power control

I think amd P-state is not as efficient as Intel's. Using the “amd_pstate=guided” or “active” parameter, it should automatically scale between the internal ‘powersave’ and “performance” governors (which are not the counterparts that can be set with cpupower). My guess is that there are random switches between the two modes even when there should not be.
See:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CPU_frequency_scaling
and specifically::
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CPU_fr … amd_pstate

limblendokin

Member

Registered: 2024-12-15

Posts: 4

Re: amd P-state power control

The best results I’ve had were with auto-cpufreq. This thing alone managed to lower power consumption to 7-10W.
It wasn’t working properly on my 6800H until I disabled AMD P-State using the following kernel parameters:

initcall_blacklist=amd_pstate_init amd_pstate.enable=0

You can find more information on their GitHub page. Personally, the results were good enough for me, so I stopped investigating further. I’d love to hear if you find a better solution!

Last edited by limblendokin (2025-04-17 17:05:08)

qu@rk

Member

Registered: 2021-07-28

Posts: 149

Re: amd P-state power control

On my PC I use:

echo "powersupersave" | sudo tee /sys/module/pcie_aspm/parameters/policy
echo "power" | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/energy_performance_preference

Not sure if the ASPM one helps on laptops but could give it a try.