Comment 37 for bug 488152

It won't help Thomas87 (knot-tomas) or himynameiskevin (kevinpook), but proper power management for AMD/ATI Radeon R600 and newer hardware is finally available in the 3.11 linux kernel. Ubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" is based on the 3.11 kernel and also includes the necessary updated radeon firmware. On Saucy, to use this power management for the AMD/ATI Radeon you will need to select it at boot by adding radeon.dpm=1 to your GRUB kernel boot options as described at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Troubleshooting#Editing_the_GRUB_2_Menu_During_Boot

See the blog post at http://www.botchco.com/agd5f/?p=57 for further information.

Unlike the older dynpm method, the new DPM method works with multiple monitors and there shouldn't be any flickering as the performance level changes are handled by dedicated hardware rather than the driver.

The currently under-development Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr" is based on the 3.13 kernel which enables DPM by default (without needing the radeon.dpm=1 boot parameter I mentioned above) for Radeon HD 4000 through Radeon HD 7000 series graphics processors but with some specific ASICs being excluded. You can download a pre-release version at http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ and the final release is scheduled for April 17th, 2014 as per https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TrustyTahr/ReleaseSchedule