DLVR bypass disabled by Intel’s new microcode

At the same time, the company would leave this option to extreme tuners, but it is not yet clear how.

With the Arrow Lake-S series processors, Intel also introduced the use of DLVR, or Digital Linear Voltage Regulator, at the desktop level, thanks to which each P-core and E-core group can be supplied with a separate voltage. This increases the efficiency of the entire system, since not all cores receive the same voltage, which has a positive effect on energy efficiency when running almost all applications.

However, there may be exceptions, because if a given program exerts a full load on the processor, then the use of DLVR can become disadvantageous, since the incoming voltage must be reduced to the voltage required for the operation of the cores and core groups. This means that while DLVR is useful for energy efficiency under the load pattern that occurs in the majority of cases, it is already disadvantageous when the load is heavy, i.e. the processor needs more energy to ensure the given performance.

The Arrow Lake-S platform arrived from the factory with the possibility to bypass DLVR in the BIOS of the motherboards, and for this it was enough to select the Power Gate Mode. However, Intel removed this option from the new 0x112 microcode, so the use of DLVR is essentially mandatory from now on. The company obviously has a good reason for this, during average use it has great advantages for the performance/consumption ratio, so actually bypassing DLVR is not a very logical choice for users, unless they are tuning.

A Hardwareluxx asked Intel about the change, and in principle, the ban on bypassing DLVR was done to prevent accidental “abuse”, so I want to make this feature available only with extreme tuning. However, the company did not address this issue.