Now that you know a little more about the performance of our new plan, let’s talk power. The AMD Ryzen Balanced power plan does not change how our processor handles low-power idle states called “CC-States.” These CC-States number cc1 through cc6, representing increasingly aggressive clock and power gating. In fact, cc6 represents a core that is essentially turned off. The core is sleeping so deeply that only its voltage can be detected by software.
The sophisticated power management technology in the “Zen” core can autonomously enter and exit these CC-States as quickly as 1ms.
Software tools, unable to see through the sleep, will simply report the last P-state known to the OS before the core entered a CC-state. Don’t be alarmed! The effective frequency of a sleeping core is much lower (generally sub-1GHz).
In short:
- The AMD Ryzen™ Balanced power plan still permits aggressive power management. There should be little difference between the OEM Balanced and the Ryzen Balanced plan. We’re interested in your feedback!
- Performance of the AMD Ryzen™ Balanced power plan should be on par with the High Performance plan. We're interested in your feedback on this, too.
- Finally, if you see a third-party tool reporting “idle” clocks in the range of 3200-3400MHz, you can be virtually certain that the core is actually sleeping and the tool is simply reporting the last known P-State.
We’re very proud of the fast and granular power management in the “Zen” architecture, and we hope these explanations helps you better understand how our all-new processor functions.
