Qualcomm Prepares IFPC Feature For Adreno X1-85 GPU With The Snapdragon X Laptops

This past week Qualcomm sent out a set of 17 patches for the MSM DRM kernel graphics driver for enabling support for the Inter Frame Power Collapse (IFPC) feature with the X1-85 GPU found in the current Snapdragon X laptops.

Inter Frame Power Collapse is a Qualcomm Adreno power savings feature that is activated between frames during graphics rendering. IFPC is reported to provide significant power savings to help with battery life and reducing thermal load. With the initial patches sent out this week, Inter Frame Power Collapse is enabled for the X1-85 GPUs found within the current Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus powered laptops.

Akhil Oommen of Qualcomm explained of the IFPC feature and MSM DRM driver enablement in the patch series as:

“This patch series introduces the IFPC feature to the DRM-MSM driver for Adreno GPUs. IFPC enables GMU to quickly transition GPU into a low power state when idle and quickly resume gpu to active state upon workload submission, hence the name ‘Inter Frame Power Collapse’. Since the KMD is unaware of these transitions, it must perform a handshake with the hardware (eg: fenced_write, OOB signaling etc) before accessing registers in the GX power domain.

Initial patches address a few existing issues that were not exposed in the absence of IFPC. With IFPC, msm_devfreq_idle becomes redundant and therefore it is disabled for GPUs that support this feature. Additionally, the DCVS tunings have been relaxed for GPUs with IFPC support to further improve power savings.

This series also adds the necessary restore register list for X1-85 GPU and enables IFPC support for it.”
The patch series and enabling for IFPC on the Adreno X1-85 is now under review. Given the timing the IFPC functionality for the MSM DRM driver isn’t expected to be mainlined until at least the Linux v6.18 merge window late in the year given that it’s now too late for making the imminent v6.17 merge window.