Intel Core i7-980X Gulftown Six-Core 32nm Processor Review

Feature Test: Intel Turbo Boost - Turbocharged

For those of you who skipped the microarchitecture section, let's recap what Turbo Boost is, what it does. Turbo Mode is an exciting feature that automatically unlocks additional speed bins (multipliers) and allows the processor to self-overclock based on thermal conditions and workload. For example, if the Power Control Unit (PCU) senses that only one core is active and the other three are in an idle state, it will use the unused power and thermal headroom to overclock that single active core to ensure superior single-threaded performance. Conversely, if you are running a multi-threaded application, the PCU will measure the thermal headroom and if the processor is running cool enough it will overclock all six cores. As on the Bloomfield processors, Gulftown's Turbo Mode can provide a 266Mhz speed boost in single-threaded workloads and 133Mhz in multi-threaded applications.

Although the results will be fairly self-evident, let's check out the performance gains that Turbo Mode provides on this top-end Core i7-980X model. As per the above, thermal conditions permitting, it will run one core at 3.59GHz for single-threaded workloads, and 3.46Ghz in multi-threaded applications.


As you can see, there are some worthwhile performance improvements in multi-threaded applications, and some more noticeable speeds boosts in single-threaded applications like SuperPI. Some people may consider the Turbo Mode feature a mere gimmick, and perhaps it is for enthusiast users. However, as we have said in the past, no ones is going to begrudge Intel for giving all users a free 133-266Mhz speed boost. The fact that it's automatic and seamless is ideal for novice computer users. We would have definitely preferred to see Intel outfit Gulftown with more aggressive Turbo Boost profiles though, à la Lynnfield, since as we will demonstrate in our overclocking section, these new 32nm cores have a lot of frequency headroom.