I’ve heard about the classical ondemand CPU scaling governor on Linux being no longer fit for modern intel CPUs, so I’ve tested the new intel_pstate governor. On Ubuntu 13.10, this is done by adding intel_pstate=enable to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line on /etc/default/grub and running update-grub.

After reading some random posts about this new governor, I’ve found that, for some people, the CPU temperature increased up to 10°C, so I’ve became a little paranoid of my computer being too hot. In order to see if it was really hotter with intel_pstate enabled or if it was just my impression, I’ve wrote a little script to acquire the temperature of one core of my i7-3520M (both cores always had almost the same temperature) every 3 seconds, for 5 minutes. The script then outputs the mean temperature for this time interval.

I’ve evaluated the following governors, without workload: ‘acpi_ondemand’, ‘acpi_performance’, ‘acpi_powersave’, ‘pstate_performance’, and ‘pstate_powersave’. The results were quite interesting for me.

acpi_ondemand     : 55.25°C