Monday, April 19th 2010
ASUS Develops Own Technology to Rival AMD Turbo Core and Intel Turbo Boost
ASUS designed its own technology comparable to AMD's Turbo Core, the ASUS Turbo Unlocker. The technology is claimed to be more advantageous than Turbo Core, since it sends every core into Boost state, rather than a limited number of cores designated as turbo cores. What's more, it supports several other Phenom II Black Edition series processors other than those based on the six-core Thuban or the quad-core Zosma. With single-threaded loads, the active core is given the maximum boost in clock speeds, while as multi-threaded load increases, even more number of cores enter a boost state. Boost state speeds decrease with increase in number of active cores. The technology is available on ASUS' entire range of motherboards based on the AMD 8-series chipsets. Details follow in a presentation by ASUS. It would be interesting to see if ASUS goes a step further and works out Turbo Unlocker for Intel Core i3 processors.
Source:
DonanimHaber
16 Comments on ASUS Develops Own Technology to Rival AMD Turbo Core and Intel Turbo Boost
AMD's solution is smarter and better and Intel's solution remains the best - power gating FTW
For people with AM2(+)/3 boards who don't overclock this is great as it may filter down to your board and provide a bonus performance boost.
When the CPU isnt using these high-power-demand instruction codes, the power consumption is lower; therefore you can increase the speed of the CPU when running "simple" instructions and remain in the TDP so long as you dont start executing complex code across all cores.
So what does this mean in practice? Regular non-optimised code can now run a little faster. OK so far. But also a hotter CPU on average. And therefore you will need improved cooling.
Yes, it is a valid approach. What will you gain? A few percentage points of improvement. Is it worth all the effort? IMO, nope. You will end up with a hotter, noisier, PC on average, for just a small speed bump. And to keep the noise and heat down, you need parts that probably cost a bit more than having bought the next processor up in the line up.
If you are the kind of person that likes to add after-market exhaust pipes, go-faster stripes, redex in your petrol, to your pimped ride, or if you tune your engine for a hotter, but lower efficiency but with slightly improved acceleration, then this might be for you.
If however you prefer to buy a properly specced sports/race car in the first place then forget this and go buy a better machine.