Undervolting can work WONDERS. Especially if you get lucky with binning. I'm running the i7 in my little 13" convertible with a ~140mV undervolt, which is the difference between unplayable and 90 pegged in DCS and War Thunder (flight sims) in VR (w/ eGPU). It's also almost an extra hour of battery life when I'm just browsing the internet or whatnot.
> There is a need for documentation concerning the relevant MSR(s) and thus waiting on Intel engineers to find such documentation internally and see if/what can be publicly released. Hopefully Intel's large open-source team will be able to provide some fruits soon<p>Well, i915 is certainly a completely different story than nouveau. Otherwise I would not be so optimistic. From the anecdotal evidence of listening to less than a handful of Intel colleagues I happen to have my hopes are not that high. According to them Intel is a horrible organization where high walls and secrecy making is more common than helping another part of the organization.
I think undervolting is good for the environment to lower the carbon footprint of CPUs. Some never multicore CPUs has TDP of +100W, it would probably be much better if we lowered the voltage and frequency for a small CPU performance hit. Thankful to the developers of the driver!<p>"The dynamic power consumed by a CPU is approximately proportional to the CPU frequency, and to the square of the CPU voltage:"
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation</a><p>ps. You can also undervolt, lower frequency of AMD CPUs.
Do people who like to play with the voltage and clock speed settings of their CPU/GPU/memory typically do so with one of these utilities? Or in the EFI/BIOS config pages?<p>I've never done this, but lately it sounds like there's sometimes quite a lot left on the table, even after part binning. Performance is so high now that I wouldn't bother doing this for an extra 5-10%, but for an extra hour of battery life, it's certainly tempting...
Hopefully the AMD MSR tool amdctl makes it as well:<p><a href="https://github.com/kevinlekiller/amdctl" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kevinlekiller/amdctl</a>
Link to actual discussion:<p><a href="https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200907094843.1949-1-Jason@zx2c4.com/T/#u" rel="nofollow">https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200907094843.1949-1-Jason@zx2...</a>
In case you too saw a new word in the title:<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_voltage_scaling" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_voltage_scaling</a>