AMD P-State Preferred Core Handling Being Enabled For Linux
AMD P-State Preferred Core Handling Being Enabled For Linux

AMD P-State Preferred Core Handling Being Enabled For Linux

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.
Can anybody ELI5 this for me? I have an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, so does that mean it'll go faster now?
Each CPU core is slightly different due to the manufacturing process, their placement on the die, and other factors.
Some cores boost higher than others, and can have better single-threaded performance, while others are a little slower.
Currently, games and programmes are assigned a random core for its main thread, which isn't ideal.
P-states will address that by sorting cores by their relative performance, and assigning the more performant cores first.
So while this doesn't make your CPU faster, applications should see a small boost in performance.
Are preferred cores identified at manufacturing, or during the everyday running of the machine?
I posted a longer comment below, but yes. It's also not in the kernel yet and might not be in some time (likely 6.7), which is probably months away from reaching normal distributions.