New speed stepping core parking stuff in Win11 era

[valis]

I can see why we have audio optimizations coming. On several machines that have laptop chipsets (low power NUC style) I had significant reduction in audio performance, and the intel drivers were partly to blame. I had to roll the OS and Intel GPU driver back to two builds ago where there are only security updates now, so it avoids the integrations.

In any case, this mostly helped:

The first thing I tried was ParkControl which sets one value, and appears as "Processor performance core parking min cores" in the Power Options applet ("Changed Advanced Power Settings" buttin in legacy power options when editing a plan, etc). But that still doesn't fully fix it, so I also followed instructions similar to this video, where the attached small app exposes many settings, which are hidden when checked.

With the attached "PowerSettingsExplorer" app (in the attached zip), Run app and UNcheck:

Processor idle demote threshold
Processor idle promote threshold

You can also set the value of Processor performance core parking min cores if you didn't want to use ParkControl above, I'm using PowerTools (current) to keep screens alive with the "Awake" sub applet, so one more thing to toggle things with when starting is the norm for a long time here (I remember using the tools to set PCI latency values back to the Win98 era).

In any case, go to power options, high performance, change advance power settings, there will be 2 new settings under Porcessor Power Management area. Set both new settings to 100%. and the third setting as well if you set that manually.

Now when you toggle high performance, apps will stay alive on the cores they are on, from Windows settings alone (C/E/etc states are all default, but that's also a non-scope audio box using an RME USB interface).

[valis]

I've been using this utility for several weeks across multiple machines, including my Scope boxes. There are a few memory related settings I still have active in the BIOS, but as of now I have all BIOS defaults on most of these machines set back to AUTO or DEFAULT or whatever the stock Intel settings are, and use this app exclusively to manage power states for C/P/TDP etc related states. Since it allows me to see the visible state of things without opening the classic control panel on Win11 it's become my default workflow.

Highly recommended, it's very light on resources when in the tasktray and easier to access than the shortcuts I used to use to change power states (because Win11 has no additional custom menus option on the taskbar like XP/Win7/Win10 did).