Turbo Mode Inside Intel's Core i7 | Intel

my name is Steve Gunther I'm a power management architect with the digital Enterprise Group in Intel Corporation I'm going to talk with you a little bit about a new technology introduced on the Heylin family processors that we refer to as Intel turbo boost technology what Intel turbo boost technology does is allows you to maximize the performance of the processor under a wide range of applications under a wide range of usage conditions so what I'm zooming in on here is a picture of the die an actual picture of the die floorplan and on the first version of the Malin family processors there's four processor cores so for independent processor core is all able to run tasks independently the other four what I'm showing in this graph is four dials on the bottom each of these represents the throughput of one of those processor cores so if I start by looking at a multi-threaded application let's look at a four threaded application where each one of those processor cores is running independent application simultaneously and you'll see the activity on each of these cores is a little bit different historically that's how we set the frequency targets of the processor we assume that every processor was running every processor core was running a high performance application simultaneously that really happens in the real world so the purpose of turbo boost technology is to take advantage of the Headroom when some of those cores are idle and turning that into higher frequency on the other course so if I'm looking at a two threaded application rather than a four threaded on the Haila my add the ability to turn off two of those cores those two cores go to zero power transparently to the system transparently to the operating system and I turn that power budget into frequency Headroom on the cores that are still active the same thing applies if I go to on a single thread workload so if one of the two cores that was on goes off I translate that power budget into more frequency on the remaining core and finally even if I'm running a multi-threaded application where all four of my cores are busy but that application isn't using the entire resources of the processor I can again translate that into more frequency on the cores that are active what does it gives me on the Nehalem processor is a capability of maximizing the performance independent of application independent of the number of threads that are active independent of operating systems and it's it really provides a big performance boost for the processor

Channel: Intel

Views: 538,261

Keywords: turbo mode inside intels core i7, world leader, silicon innovation, develops technologies, products, intel, intel laptop, intel commercial, microprocessors, intel core, microchip

Id: llOXMPXH2VA

Length: 2min 11sec (131 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 12 2008