2008/10/8 Rafał Miłecki
Did you compare power consumption with and without patch?
I gathered some numbers through ACPI battery state, but I frankly don't trust it. On my T60, no wireless, lowest brightness, and CPU at lowest stepping mode yielded ~15W with stock radeonhd. Switching on PowerPlay dropped this number slightly, but I personally don't consider it statistically significant. Manually switching to mode 0, which down-clocks GPU and memory as low as it will go, gives 0.5 to 0.8W of saving. It seems that the hardware already initializes to a fairly efficient state, at least for me, regardless of PowerPlay. As I understand it, dynamic clock gating of the memory controller block and dynamic voltage drop can yield more, but these areas are proving problematic.
How hard will it be to introduce R600/R700 support in your patch?
I've been told PowerPlay was changed entirely for R600, so it's hard to say until they give us those headers. In any case, the AtomBIOS portion will most likely just work, or do nothing; the existing bit-banging parts won't affect and can't be re-sued for R600+ PowerPlay at all. Yang