Turbo Boost & Processor Efficiency as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2015-05-07
·
769 words · ~3 min read
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have you ever noticed that when you want to find out what speed your CPU or
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graphics card runs that there's a bunch of seemingly conflicting information
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well the way processors work has changed in amazing ways over the last couple of
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decades but one of the most remarkable things about modern microprocessors
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whether we're talking about the ones that go in your phone your PC or even in
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a massive server is their ability to dynamically deliver only the performance
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that's needed at a given moment I'll explain why they do this but first a bit
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of history it didn't always work this way when I was growing up a 486 TX 33
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megahertz processor ran it 33 megahertz gosh darn it and if 33 megahertz was
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good enough for when it was working hard then it was good enough rone it was sitting around doing nothing - and that
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was fine well a couple of things were still true first is that processors ran
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so cool that they just needed tiny small thin heat sinks on the MOR at worst a
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very small fan and second is that the laptop mobile PC revolution hadn't
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started yet and a little extra power consumption is a relatively small deal
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if you're not trying to power something off of a battery well that changed fast
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Intel and AMD were locked in an arms race to see who could create that
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fastest desktop CPUs voltages and power were pumped up and existing design
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architectures were pushed to their limits all without worrying too much
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about efficiency in pursuit of the almighty gigahertz barrier and beyond to
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hell with cool and quiet I mean to put this in perspective from 1996 to 2000
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alone stop cooling went from looking like this to looking like this but that
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all came at a cost your power bill aside more power consumption produces waste
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heat and when a processor runs hot all the time its lifespan is reduced
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something had to be done but what if you
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could run at benchmark crushing high performance frequencies when needed and
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turned down the juice the rest of the time well that's exactly what happened
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Intel speedstep was born all right light it so that's a lot of preamble but why
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does my CPU or graphics card have these ambiguous specifications well because
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while all this was happening a mobile revolution was occurring and when you're
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going to be running off of a battery power consumption sits in the fur seat
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and raw performance sits in the back so the philosophies of the processor makers
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changed and we stopped getting massive leaps in single core performance but
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computing demands also didn't stand still so they needed a different
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solution back to this graph a lower clock processor core actually consumes
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so much less power that you can put more
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than one of them on a CPU instead of a single high-performance core for better
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overall performance and optimized workloads multi-core processors were
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born but some applications don't benefit
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from these additional cores and we still need to crush single threaded
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performance from time to time and that's what a CPU with Intel turbo booth does
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unlike speed steps outright performance
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reduction it actually redirects power from coarse that aren't needed and
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sacrifices some efficiency in the remaining core or course to boost up the
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clock speeds to a predetermined limit and that is what we see when we look at
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CPU specifications a nominal frequency that all course can reach at the same
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time and an amped-up boosted frequency
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that a single core can reach as long as thermal and power limits allow it when
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you need the extra juice this type of dynamic power on-demand design isn't
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unique to Intel either NVIDIA GPU boost boosts the entire processor rather than
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redirecting power from one part to another but similarly looks for
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sufficiently low power consumption and temperatures and increases performance
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on demand pretty cool stuff hey speaking of pretty cool my CPU when it's idle
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yeah sorry no awkward segue today since our sales team didn't manage to sell an
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add integration on this video so that's all that's left is for me to thank you
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guys for watching pathetically beg you to like and share the video or dislike
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it if you hate it I think that's fine too and remind you to subscribe if you
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haven't already see you next time