AMD CPUs since the Ryzen 3000 series (Zen 2) have had the notion of “preferred cores” that via ACPI CPPC are communicated to the OS and could be shown under Windows with the likes of AMD Ryzen Master. Now we have AMD Linux engineers working on properly leveraging the “preferred cores” handling for the modern AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver that’s seen much work over the past two years.

  • vividspecter@lemm.eeOP
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    1 year ago

    Lightly threaded workloads will reach higher clocks on systems with recent AMD CPUs, allowing for greater performance. This is because some cores can more easily reach these clocks than others. Most desktop workloads can benefit from this, because few are heavily multithreaded.

    There’s a bit more that goes into it (temperature and power usage are taken into account) but that’s the short answer.