CORE Or Boost? AMD's And Intel's Turbo Features Dissected

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Intel arms its Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs with Turbo Boost. AMD's hexa-core Phenom II X6 chips sport Turbo CORE. Both technologies dynamically increase performance based on perceived workloads and available thermal headroom. Which one does the better job?

Benchmark Results: Audio/Video

iTunes is single-threaded, and is better-accelerated on the Phenom II X6 with Turbo CORE enabled.

The same applies to Lame.

MainConcept is optimized to take advantage of multiple cores, so it benefits more from Turbo Boost, which can kick in even if many cores are taxed.

Once again, we see the multi-threaded advantage in HandBrake, where AMD's processor easily hits its limits on all six cores, preventing Turbo CORE from kicking in.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos