Intel Turbo Boost is

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

's trade name for

central processing units A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, an ...

(CPUs)

dynamic frequency scaling Dynamic frequency scaling (also known as CPU throttling) is a power management technique in computer architecture whereby the frequency of a microprocessor can be automatically adjusted "on the fly" depending on the actual needs, to conserve ...

feature that automatically raises certain versions of its operating frequency when demanding tasks are running, thus enabling a higher resulting performance. The frequency is accelerated when the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

requests the highest performance state of the processor. Processor performance states are defined by the

Advanced Configuration and Power Interface Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is an open standard that operating systems can use to discover and configure computer hardware components, to perform power management (e.g. putting unused hardware components to sleep), auto c ...

(ACPI) specification, an

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definitio ...

supported by all major operating systems; no additional software or drivers are required to support the technology. The design concept behind Turbo Boost is commonly referred to as "dynamic

overclocking In computing, overclocking is the practice of increasing the clock rate of a computer to exceed that certified by the manufacturer. Commonly, operating voltage is also increased to maintain a component's operational stability at accelerated spe ...

". When the workload on the processor calls for faster performance, the processor's clock will try to increase the operating frequency in regular increments as required to meet demand. The increased clock rate is limited by the processor's power, current, and

thermal A thermal column (or thermal) is a rising mass of buoyant air, a convective current in the atmosphere, that transfers heat energy vertically. Thermals are created by the uneven heating of Earth's surface from solar radiation, and are an example ...

limits, the number of cores currently in use, and the maximum frequency of the active cores. Turbo-Boost-enabled processors are the Core i3,

Core i5 The following is a list of Intel Core i5 brand microprocessors. Introduced in 2009, the Core i5 line of microprocessors are intended to be used by mainstream users. Desktop processors Nehalem microarchitecture (1st generation) "Lynnf ...

, Core i7, Core i9 and

Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same a ...

series manufactured since 2008, more particularly, those based on the Nehalem, and later

microarchitecture In computer engineering, microarchitecture, also called computer organization and sometimes abbreviated as µarch or uarch, is the way a given instruction set architecture (ISA) is implemented in a particular processor. A given ISA may be imp ...

Support across CPUs

Frequency increases occur in increments of 133 MHz for Nehalem processors and 100 MHz for Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell and Skylake processors. When any electrical or thermal limits are exceeded, the operating frequency automatically decreases in decrements of 133 or 100 MHz until the processor is again operating within its design limits. Turbo Boost 2.0 was introduced in 2011 with the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, while Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 was introduced in 2016 with the Broadwell-E

. A feature of Turbo Boost 2.0 is that it introduced time windows with different levels of power limits, so that a processor can boost to a higher frequency for a few seconds. These limits are configurable in software for unlocked processors. Some motherboard vendors intentionally use values higher than Intel's default for performance, causing the processor to exceed its

thermal design power The thermal design power (TDP), sometimes called thermal design point, is the maximum amount of heat generated by a computer chip or component (often a CPU, GPU or system on a chip) that the cooling system in a computer is designed to dissipa ...

(TDP). Some Intel Core X Processors and some newer Intel Core Processors (e.g. 10th Gen Desktop Core i7) support Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 Technology. Newer version

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on ...

and

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...

support Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 Technology.

History

An Intel November 2008 white paper discusses "Turbo Boost" technology as a new feature incorporated into Nehalem-based processors released in the same month. A similar feature called Intel Dynamic Acceleration (IDA) was available on many Core 2 based Centrino platforms. This feature did not receive the marketing treatment given to Turbo Boost. Intel Dynamic Acceleration dynamically changed the core frequency as a function of the number of active cores. When the operating system instructed one of the active cores to enter C3 sleep state using the

(ACPI), the other active core(s) dynamically accelerated to a higher frequency. Intel Turbo Boost Technology Monitor, as a GUI utility, could be used to monitor Turbo Boost; this utility has reached the end-of-life state by no longer supporting Intel processors released after Q2 2013, and is no longer available.

References

External links

Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0Intel program to graphically show Turbo BoostTurbo Boost reporting tool for LinuxEvaluation of the Intel Core i7 Turbo Boost feature
by James Charles, Preet Jassi, Ananth Narayan S, Abbas Sadat and Alexandra Fedorova {{Computer processor power management technologies X86 architecture Intel microprocessors Computer hardware tuning

Support across CPUs

History

See also

References

External links