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By The Linux Camp News, September 29, 2026
Three AMD P-State preference values change for Zen 6 performance and low-power cores. The patch is queued in a development branch for a planned Linux 7.4 pull request, without published performance or power measurements.
AMD submitted a three-value adjustment to Zen 6 client AMD P-State tuning on September 28, 2026, at 20:35 UTC. As of source retrieval on September 29, Mario Limonciello had applied it to his bleeding-edge development branch and planned to include it in a Linux 7.4 pull request. That establishes development-branch acceptance, not released-kernel availability. 2 5 6
Energy Performance Preference, or EPP, expresses a bias between performance and energy savings, rather than a wattage target. Lower values favor performance; higher values, up to 255, favor savings. The driver’s tuning infrastructure allows different values for each system-on-chip and core type, so the same named preference need not imply the same numerical setting across cores. 1 3 4
The performance core’s power entry rises from 64 to 115. For low-power cores, balance_performance rises from 51 to 64, while power falls from 115 to 64. Applying the EPP scale, the first two changes bias toward energy savings, but the third biases toward performance relative to its previous setting. This is therefore not a uniform move toward lower power consumption. 1 2
The scope is the existing Zen 6 client table, not new core-support infrastructure. Its source comment restricts these per-core-type overrides to hybrid systems, which combine different core types; non-hybrid systems retain legacy defaults. Efficiency-core entries are unchanged by this revision. 2 4 1
For kernel selection, check integration of this revision and its prerequisite table rather than treating the planned 7.4 target as confirmation. AMD attributes the adjustment to platform characterization, but the submission supplies no workloads or measurements explaining these exact values. It supports reporting a preference change, not a demonstrated battery-life or throughput improvement. 6 2