AMD announces Turbo CORE for upcoming desktop CPUs

One of the ways to boost single-threaded performance on multicore machines is to shut down the cores that aren’t in use and divert power to whichever cores are running the single-threaded workload. That’s essentially what Intel’s Turbo Boost does—it can dynamically “overclock” one or more individual cores, based on the needs of the system and the amount of power and thermal headroom available.

This “brute force” approach is actually the opposite of making use of multicore—it’s about deliberately cutting back on the processor’s core count, in some cases all the way down to one active core, in exchange for a single-threaded boost. In short, it amounts to a temporary, strategic retreat from the multicore era.

Now AMD has revealed new details of how it plans to endow its multicore processors with the same dynamic power optimization capabilities, but (at least initially) via a much cruder implementation.

Read more: arstechnica.com