Set CPU to high performance

Question

I spent hours searching for an answer in Internet. All I could find doesn't help. I have Intel i9-9980HK, running under Ubuntu 20.04, kernel 5.4.0-33.

The problem is that under the full load the CPU lowers the frequency to 2.7 GHZ, I guess in order to stay under low power budget. Whatever I try I can't make it run faster. It stays under 65C, quietly and slowly crunching numbers. For comparison the same machine under Windows runs from 3 to 4+ GHz under the full load.

What I tried:

• Change the governor to performance. No effect.
• Set /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policyX/energy_performance_preference to performance. No effect.
• sudo service thermald stop. No effect.
• Increase /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/turbo_pct. Access denied even for root.
• Increase /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policyX/scaling_min_freq. No effect.

I am lost. What does it want? Btw, /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/status is active.

Update. I think I know the reason. When intel_pstate is active, it ignores all the settings (like governor, everything under /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq). Tools like cpupower cannot control intel_pstate. So the question pretty much boils down to how control intel_pstate driver.

Answer 1

The solution turned out to be to pass intel_pstate=passive to kernel. Then intel_pstate relinquishes control back to CPUFreq. The latter still uses intel_pstate to govern the CPU, but intel_pstate has no say in what to do. After that you can finally set performance policies. Your laptop can be either completely quiet or you can make it very noisy, but powerful. When intel_pstate is active the machine is neither quiet nor well performing, but rather always slow and noisy.

Answer 2

As mentioned on the comment this question have a lot of information on how to change the CPU settings.

Why is it called "ondemand", but it sets other governors (for example with the intel_pstate driver it will set the powersave governor)? Because this tool pre-dates the intel_pstate driver, back to a time when, by far, the dominant frequency scaling driver was the acpi-cpufreq driver, and "ondemand" was the preferred Ubuntu default governor.

Intel Pstate: is a part of the CPU performance scaling subsystem in the Linux kernel (CPUFreq). It is a scaling driver for the Sandy Bridge and later generations of Intel processors. Note, however, that some of those processors may not be supported. To understand intel_pstate it is necessary to know how CPUFreq works in general, so this is the time to read CPU Performance Scaling if you have not done that yet.

You can add intel_pstate=disable in your kernel book parameter to disable it, more details here.