Improve Opteron 6200's performance (and PPD) by using TurionPowerControl

Looks like pretty good find Congratulations!

By limiting P-state to 1 we're basically containing CPU to "all-core turbo" bin.

 

Soooooo..... 62xx chips good now? Or just on par now.

 

Nice find! Might make it worth grabbing 62xx chips now. Interesting.

 

I'd actually be interested in logging into 6200 system (don't have one) and checking few things out before the command is run...

Anyone?

 

Does seem to be helping I'm seeing about a 2 min decrease in TPF on an 8101 on my 2 x 6272 box.

 

People...... make this happen.

 

subscribed

 

Hmm so much for the lower TPF - this change seems to have created some instability as that box is now crashing. Should that change carry over through a reboot? What -psmax do I need to set to get it back to "default" settings.

 

It shouldn't cause instability per se...

I would expect -psmax 0 would revert it to normal
and no, it does not persist across reboots.

How is the box crashing? What are your temps? I'm assuming that Turbo is enabled in the BIOS, correct?

 

Temps seem ok but it's crashing almost immediately now after folding starts so it's hard to get any read on what they are like under the load. This box was working 100% completely fine till I did the -psmax change. Maybe just a coincidence?.

 

If you power-cycled the box and symptoms persist I'd call it a coincidence...

What are the symptoms of a crash? Freeze? FahCore crash? Something else?

 

The box is resetting on it's own. Except this last time - can't connect via ssh and no ipmi on this box. Will have to wait till I'm back in the office on Monday to check on it and figure out what's wrong with it.

 

I would be happy to let you experiment on my machine but I'm 2,000 miles away from it right now.

 

Ahh, gotcha (opened docs just now). I made psmax=max performance connection (wrong).

You're right, -psmax 6 is the way to go.

So, the manipulation in question moves the lower (performance) limit up. Interesting.
Almost smells like a flaw in the CPU -- I wouldn't expect this to be settable beyond
2 (numbooststates). Great find indeed!

I created small script that measures frequency (incl. turbo) -- http://darkswarm.org/freqcheck.sh
I'm very curious to see what it reports (w/FAH load) fresh out of power-cycle
(psmax 6) and with psmax 1 (set via TPC).

 

Wow. Nice ppd there. This is interesting indeed.

 

NICE. Seems like you've already done all the homework.

It looks like testing w/my script may be redundant at this point -- I'll leave it for you to decide.

Cool. We can only hope that AMD carries this... er... feature... into future CPUs

 

Is this limited to the 62xx series or would the 61xx series benefit at all?

 

6200s only.

If your PowerNow is already disabled (w/6100s) then you're already using optimal configuration.

 

cool. not using anything yet as I still don't have a motherboard Have to get my car up and running first, but I have a ton of parts lying around just waiting for that to happen.

 

I tried this on my IL 6272 4P rig, but got some error messages! The mobo is a Tyan 8812.
What have I done wrong?

The error messages says this:

vidar@G34Rigg1:~/fah$ TurionPowerControl -psmax 5
Turion Power States Optimization and Control - by blackshard - v0.43

ReadPciConfigDwordEx: pread: Success
Interlagos::getNumBoostStates unable to read boost control register
ReadPciConfigDwordEx: pread: Success
ReadPciConfigDwordEx: pread: Success
Warning: unable to detect multiprocessor machine
ReadPciConfigDwordEx: pread: Success
Interlagos.cpp::getMaximumPState - unable to read PCI register
ReadPciConfigDwordEx: pread: Success
Interlagos.cpp::setMaximumPState - unable to read PCI register

Done.
vidar@G34Rigg1:~/fah$

 

sudo modprobe msr
sudo modprobe cpuid
sudo TurionPowerControl -psmax 1

should get you going...

 

Hi everyone.

I use this thread to ask if Interlagos ES like these ( for exemple ) : http://www.ebay.de/itm/AMD-Opteron-...US_Server_CPUs_Processors&hash=item35be42ef73) will work with TPC v 0.422 in order to use there unlocked properties ( voltage ... ) ?

 

Thanks tear!

I did the:

sudo modprobe msr
sudo modprobe cpuid
sudo TurionPowerControl -psmax 1

And it replayed with: Done

So far it seems correct, but the machine change in to be very slow, and when it did not progress with another % after 25 min. I stopped folding, and tried restarted the machine. I did not shut down all the way, so I have to push the button. It then came on again at TPF is back to normale.

It seems that there is some thing wrong in my way of doing this. Should the TurionPowerControl be started before I start fah6 or could it be done while the machine is folding?

 

It shouldn't matter, just make sure that PowerNow along with Turbo Core / CPB are enabled in the BIOS.

If it still isn't working for you, you could try and set "performance" scaling governor first thing after boot (before running TPC):

Code:

sudo -s
for i in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu[0-9]* ; do echo performance > $i/cpufreq/scaling_governor ; done
exit

These are production CPUs we're talking about, right?

 

Yes it is production CPUs! I belive I have the PowerNow disablet, and will look in to it, and belive that is the problem why it did not respond.

Update:
Works great, PPD up from 305K to 366K for Project: 8101 (Run 23, Clone 1, Gen 21).
But it produces some more heat and are using 100W+ from the wall, and total consume is now 680W for this rig.

Thanks tear!

 

Hi, What is the TPF on the 8101? Thanks, Best regards, Charlie

 

At the moment TPF is 13:05

 

61k ppd for 100 more watts, worth it.

just out of curiosity what are the 6100 series chips doing 8101's at?

 

Before the update the rig produced 305K with 580W, which was 52.6 K per. 100W, so it's probably worth it, yes.

My 6176se rig = 329K PPD
My 6172 rig = 295K PPD

The results may vary significantly from WU to WU. You can see more results here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aspl6-RkaxtFdHdTdUdmUjhWalpXWVZ2S2xvejBDcHc#gid=0

 

The 6176se rig uses 665W, and 6172 595W from the wall. On the 6172 I did change the PSU a while ago from a 80+ to a 80+ Silver, and the consumption drop from 635 to 595W for that reason. All Power consumption measured with P8101 in folding. Before the update with TurionPowerControl the 6272 rig use 575 - 580W from the wall. It may vary a little from WU to WU. Where I live we have 230V system

 

thats not bad at all.. looks like the 6200 series finally became useful again. hope this works on the piledriver chips as well, those numbers should be pretty damn good with the improvements.

 

Another advantage of the 6200 opterons is that they support the AVX instructions.

http://www.gromacs.org/Documentation/Acceleration_and_parallelization#SSE.2c_AVX.2c_etc

It could be useful for the futur Gromacs 4.6 .

 

lets just say F@H is really really slow to changes. so even if AVX was added don't expect to see it in F@H for a few years.

 

There has been speculation that 8101 favours the faster memory thats available with the 62xx chips but it was only talked about for a couple of days and i haven't seen any more on it for a while now.