I bought a Laptop with a Ryzen 5 3500U inside. While its a “3000” chip, its still the inferior Zen 1(+) architecture, so I wanted to tweak the cpu a bit for improved battery life and a cooler lap.
Enter zenstates: While voltage per state is locked/ignored (thanks AMD!), I can still reenable P-states 3 to 7. Unfortunately, even after enabling them and setting lower frequency p-states, they aren’t being used: “cpupower frequency-info” shows only the original 3 power states (“Total States: 3”) and the lower cpu frequencies are not being reached.
Why do P3+ states get ignored? How can I reenable them, preferably permanently (after testing for stability)?
P.S. Editing the original P2 state to a lower frequency does drop the minimum frequency further while idling.
P.P.S. Running Kernel 5.7 & Manjaro distro
Oh… Mhh then I guess… I cant enable it, despite zenstates being able to define additional p-states?
Or is there still a way to enable additional p-states? I certainly dunno what I’m talking about, but isn’t this done mostly in software, thus reenabling (custom) lower power p-states theoretically possible?
The CPU’s only support 3 user controlled base P-states.
However this is no issue. The chip will actually automatically interpolate between those P-states as needed. Ryzen has a far more capable dynamic clock system than any previous 10h->16h chips.
And there is little point going below 2GHz, even on first gen 1700X 2.2GHz is very low voltage.