AMD discusses Turbo CORE technology

[wahdangun]

AMD's John Fruehe explains Bulldozer's new Turbo CORE technology in a company blog post.

We are including a new feature in “Bulldozer” that will help you take your performance up to 11. This feature, which is new to our server processors, is called AMD Turbo CORE technology and it allows you to capture that extra power headroom between average and maximum power, turning it into more clock speed. So, how does it work? Perhaps a little background about how clock speed is derived will help first.

Contrary to popular belief, clock speed is not determined based on the best case scenario; that is to say that when we stamp a number like 2.2 GHz onto an AMD Opteron™ 6174 processor, that isn’t the best that it can perform. To some degree it is more like the worst case scenario.

Processors all run workloads, and to determine the clock speed, you determine what is the maximum speed that you can run the processor at before you hit the maximum amount of power allowed, the thermal design power or TDP. TDP is the maximum allowed power consumption, but, like the maximum speed capability of your car, you will rarely ever hit TDP because most workloads don’t stress the processors the way the testing does.

When we test processors to assign their clock speed, we actually test them under a methodology that includes using programs designed to stress every transistor at the same time, maximizing the power consumption to try to reach TDP. The challenge is that the workloads that most customers use don’t come anywhere close to consuming the power that the test does, so the actual marked clock speed is conservative. Obviously when I type this blog the CPU power is nowhere near the power of running computational fluid dynamics programs, so there is a variance between workloads; the same silicon would have a lower clock speed for server than client workloads because the client workload is less intensive.

wow, can you imagine up to 1Ghz + oc with turbo boost on air with standard cooler.

btw the lowest turbo boost when all core is active is 500 mhz

 

[erixx]

hare khrishna and wtf does he 'add' to knowledge?

 

[JF-AMD]

Tengo conocimiento

There seems to be a lot of people learning about Turbo CORE this week, did you know all of the details?

 

[Mussels]

Tengo conocimiento

There seems to be a lot of people learning about Turbo CORE this week, did you know all of the details?

AMD wants to take away overclockers jobs boooo


(kidding, turbo sounds good)

 

[JF-AMD]

That is so wrong I don't even know where to start. You will be able to overclock all you want.

 

[Mussels]

it was a joke JF-AMD, i said so in the brackets.

 

[f22a4bandit]

Sounds pretty good to me. I'm interested to see Bulldozer in action on the client side!

 

[cadaveca]

That is so wrong I don't even know where to start. You will be able to overclock all you want.

So, there will be a way to disable this TDP limitation?

 

[wahdangun]

Tengo conocimiento

There seems to be a lot of people learning about Turbo CORE this week, did you know all of the details?

not really, can you please explain it more detailed ?

AMD wants to take away overclockers jobs boooo


(kidding, turbo sounds good)

yeah, its make ocing kind boring lol( i remember in the athalon days we must solder several pin or even use pencil mod to unlock the multi), but i like it

 

[Mussels]

So, there will be a way to disable this TDP limitation?

its going to be the same as intels turbo in that regard, even if AMD dont officially support it, mobo manufacturers will find a way to give us all the fine tuning we want.

 

[JF-AMD]

it was a joke JF-AMD, i said so in the brackets.

Doh! Daddy needs coffee. I guess I need to underclock for the day as punishment

 

[cadaveca]

Doh! Daddy needs coffee. I guess I need to underclock for the day as punishment

LoL, saving some energy is punishment? Dude....

its going to be the same as intels turbo in that regard, even if AMD dont officially support it, mobo manufacturers will find a way to give us all the fine tuning we want.

You assume that that is what i want...you might be wrong.

 

[wolf]

I'm a huge fan of Turbo technology such as AMD's implementation with multi core CPU's, and it is very interesting to read about the differences between client and server variants.

this is just the thing that 4+ core CPU's need to deliver in applications that use a low core count, and makes a whole lot of sense in both the client/server scenario's to make sure that you not only get the most performance from your CPU, but the best value for the power that is being consumed.