I have a Dell XPS 13 9370 with an i7-8550u CPU which should handle Gnome without any issues. The Ubuntu version is 18.04. But now experience the following problem: When setting the scaling governor to powersave the activity overview animation is very laggy (that one you access by pressing the Super key only). Furthermore it feels a bit strange for me that my system idles with a CPU frequency of 800 MHz but the CPU specification says that the base frequency is 1.8 GHz. If I set the governor to performance those animations are absolutely smooth. The problem is that the CPU now idles at around 3 GHz which results in a high battery consumption.
So what's exactly my question: Is it normal that exactly that Gnome animation is laggy? If so, can we expect an improvement in upcoming versions? Are the configurations with the intel_pstate driver correct? Why is the CPU not able to increase the frequency fast enough to make this animation smooth? Could I maybe disable this specific animation? Is it normal that my CPU idles with a lower frequency than its description says?
Best regards
Ok, it looks like I have found the problem.
I wrote a little script which measured the CPU frequency every 1/10 second and the result was that the CPU wasn't correctly scaling up when pressing the Super button to get the gnome overview (it did not exceed 2200 MHz). After removing tlp the CPU scales up to round 300MHz (and that much faster!) which results in a non-laggy overview.
So it seems like that tlp cuts off the CPU frequency.