Intel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Corporation ’s upcoming Core i7 processors will feature a turbo mode, as announced on Day 1 of IDF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDF . Although not quite like the retro turbo mode button found on computers of the late 1980’s, the turbo mode on Core i7 will still result in increased single threaded performance. The technology is based on the idea of dynamically increasing the frequency of the CPU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit  when not all the cores are in use, archiving higher single threaded performance when that is all that is required.

ZoomThe technology is aided by the improved power management features found on Nehalem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Nehalem_(microarchitecture) also announced at IDF. The Integrated Power Gate technology will shut off idle cores, reducing their voltage to zero, rather than just lowering the power provided to them. Not having as many cores on using power and producing heat, will allow other cores to use more power, increasing the performance of those cores, while still not exceeding the maximum TDP of the processor.

In the following scenario for example, if you are using a Core i7 with 4 cores, and the game you are using uses only a single core, the other three cores will turn off, reducing the heat produced by your processor, allowing the only running core to be automatically overclocked for higher performance. This new technology may be a compelling reason for many to no longer choose the faster clocked dual core processor over the slower quad core, as the quad core could offer now equal single threaded performance at the same price.

Exactly what type of improvement is expected form this turbo mode is yet to be seen, but early leaked demonstrations show at least a single stepping of improvement, 22 to 23 for example. What this Turbo Mode means for overclockers is also yet to be seen also. Some are saying overclocking on Nehalem will be very difficult if Intel so chooses to make it so however. Leaked information also indicates that production CPUs will self overclock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overclocking by up to two speed bins — for example jumping from 3 GHz to 3.2 GHz or even 3.4 GHz.

With this kind of headroom, it will be interesting to see how far enthusiasts will be able to push Core i7 processors. Even Intel indicated to us in June that Core i7 silicon is extremely healthy. Our own tests revealed that Core i7 processors will have considerable amount of headroom in terms of clock speeds.

For those who remember, the original "turbo button" found on many PCs back in the day, was there not actually to speed up the CPU, but actually to slow it down. When activated, the CPU actually ran at full speed. With the turbo button switched off, the CPU would be underclocked to allow certain legacy applications to run at "normal" speeds instead of "too fast."



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No, this is useless on a normal PC.  Your computer doesn't use a single thread, ever.  Look in your task manager, you have at least a dozen apps running all the time and they each use at least one thread.  What would be better is to allow the user to customize which apps get their own cores at execution time.  (So, something in the properties of the file could be set) so that if a free core is available, it will use it, otherwise it will share a core.  So that games can have their own core.

I can't see any practical value to Intel's solution except in limited microkernal operations.  It's more science than useful.

It's like saying, "Hey guys, you know, if we shut off the other cores, we have less heat and we could run a single core faster!  Wow!"  And the other guy says, "Yea, except that you can't get it to go THAT much faster that it would be better than having two cores."   And he replies, "Oh yea, there is that."

KAYBEE

well from what i gather from the article it wont be like that...
more like if you have a 3ghz i7 it will overclock to 3.2 or 3.4ghz. nothing crazy like a whole 1000mhz (1ghz)

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You guys are missing what I'm saying.  You don't have a single app running on your computer, ever.  Even when you only had 1 core in your PC, you still have tons of things using different threads. 

Do this, right click your task bar, select TASK MANAGER

Select Processes

Under the VIEW tab at the top, choose SELECT COLUMNS

Click on THREAD COUNT and click OK

Now, add up how many threads you have in use.  You will never ever have just one app using 1 thread running.  Never.  So you will ALWAYS be using multiple cores.  Or you could use a single core, but it would have to share its threads (Like it has always done) which reduces your performance.

Again, you'd be better off being able to request a free core.  So that your game could use a core all to its self and never have to share with the other threads.

But you still have to wait for the Northbridge, so none of these solutions are really good until they come up with a really new design that can take advantage of this stuff properly.

No, because an integrated device wouldn't use a multicore chip if it only needed a single thread.  Gimmick maybe.  They can say the processor is faster than it really is.  Maybe if it did some sort of burst pipelining, where it had a stack ready to go while the other stacks were still lining up, so it shut down the other cores while processing that one stack, and then flipped them back on to handle the flow.

Sort of like, imagine going to the grocery store, and each check-out lane is a core (Really a processing thread, but whatever) and everyone is shopping and going to the lanes.  Most of the time, you have all the lanes full, so groceries are being checked out down each core.  But someitimes folks are still shopping, and the lanes are free, and one dude comes up.  During that time, you could shut down the other lanes and get that guy's groceries out faster. 

The performance impact of that would be minimal, but could correct some bottlenecks with the Northbridge.  The problem is, instructions tend to be cached fairly well today, and finding a lone stack would be difficult.  I'm not sure you'd see much of a bump in overall speed from this.  Maybe a little. 

I really don't know.  It might just be some proof of concept thing and have no real-world value.  They do that sometimes.