Energy Performance Preference

Energy Performance Preference (EPP) is a CPU power-management feature available on many modern processors (particularly Intel and AMD). It allows the operating system or user to influence the CPU’s balance between performance and power consumption. Instead of forcing a strict maximum performance or minimum power mode, EPP provides a hint to the processor’s hardware power control logic about the desired balance.

The actual effect depends on the CPU model and firmware, but in general, lower EPP values tell a processor to favor performance while higher values tell it to favor lower power consumption.

Caveats

  • EPP is only a preference or hint to the hardware. It does not guarantee that the CPU will behave in a precise or deterministic way.

  • EPP value interpretations will often vary between different CPUs.

  • Hardware support is required. On some processors, EPP may have no effect even if it appears to be configurable in the OS.

  • Some systems may require an update to BIOS settings to allow OS control of power regulation.

EPP values on Ubuntu

On Ubuntu, the EPP for each core on a CPU is stored in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu#/cpufreq/energy_performance_preference. To check the current status on cpu0, for example, you can run:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/energy_performance_preference

This file will normally contain one of the following named profiles:

  • performance - Prioritize responsiveness and raw performance.

  • balance_performance - Lean toward performance, with lower power consumption.

  • balance_power - Lean toward reduced power, with some additional performance.

  • power - Prioritize a reduction in power consumption.

  • default - Use the default mix of power and performance as recommended by Ubuntu.

The full list of options is provided in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu#/cpufreq/energy_performance_available_preferences. To see them, run:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/energy_performance_available_preferences

which will display something like:

default performance balance_performance balance_power power

For more specificity, a raw numeric value from 0-255 can also be provided in the energy_performance_preference file. In general, a value closer to 0 will prioritize performance and a value closer to 255 will prioritize efficiency.

Setting EPP values

EPP values are managed through each core’s energy_performance_preference file, so the EPP values can be updated manually by overriding the contents of that file. For example, to set cpu0 to the performance profile, run the following:

echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/energy_performance_preference

There are several additional tools that can manipulate EPP values on Ubuntu too.

cpupower will likely override the value to performance on all cores when swapping to the performance governer with:

sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance

On Ubuntu Desktop, GNOME provides a power management menu in settings with options that may modify EPP values.

Power mode settings section

These settings will normally map to the following EPP profiles:

Power Mode setting

EPP profile

Performance

performance

Balanced

balance_performance

Power Saver

power