Comment 29 for bug 771963

Luis Silva, having a look at http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index3h2 it would appear that upstream has intentionally not chosen "Auto" as the default power_profile due to the information provided within the section:
>"Power management is supported on all asics (r1xx-evergreen) that include the appropriate power state tables in the vbios; not all boards do (especially older desktop cards). "dpm" is only supported on R6xx and newer asics."

Ubuntu wouldn't deviate from this upstream policy for a few reasons:
1) It could cause adverse effects on default installs for folks with older graphics cards.
2) If it absolutely would cause no adverse effects, deviating from upstream this way would cause an undo maintenance burden of Ubuntu. It would be strongly preferred that if something is changed from the current default behavior, it is done upstream first.

Despite this, the suggestion of power_profile to reduce power consumption has been documented in the Ubuntu documentation for reducing power consumption:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PowerManagement/ReducedPower

xserver-xorg-video-ati -> Wishlist Won't Fix

This does not mean that this report is closed, but that the discussion may still continue as noted in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Bug%20statuses .