Laptop Performance: irqbalancer vs. intel_pstate

Today I uninstalled irqbalancer and noticed a performance gain on my GNOME desktop.

The CPUfreq control panel showed me IRQBALANCE DETECTED, and they state the following:

Why I should not use a single core for power saving

• Modern OS/kernels work better on multi-core architectures.
• You need at least 1 core for a foreground application and 1 for background system services.
• Linux Kernel switches between CPU cores to avoid overheating, CPU thermal throttling, and to balance system load.
• Many CPUs have Hyper-Threading (HT) technology enabled by default. So there is no reason to run half of a physical CPU core.

These points are stated very simply. I feel there are some contradictions here.

I’m not certain how my laptop’s battery drains when running without intel_pstate=skylake_hwp set to disable. The pstate documentation makes sense to me. I primarily suspect the issue was with irqbalancer. I will need to do some stress testing later to confirm this…