14 DAY TRIAL // After quite a few months in which Intel had been the sole supplier of CPUs with the dynamic overclocking technology, Advanced Micro Devices came with its Thuban lineup and promised that its six-core chips would be able to boost clock speeds by up to 500MHz. This, naturally, grabbed the attention of end-users, even though the Turbo Core technology couldn't really turn off idle cores, like Turbo Boost could, instead reducing them to 800MHz. It seems, however, that this much is not enough for some of the company's partners.
Turbo Core downclocks unused cores and pushes the others up by up to 500MHz when multiple cores are idle. ASUS, however, claims that it has developed a better solution, which can not just do this much, but also boost the clocks of all six cores in highly threaded applications, according to a report by Donanimhaber. Depending on the application’s intensity and on the number of threads it uses, clocks will be able to go up by up to 500MHz, even while staying at the allotted TDP level.
AMD's Turbo Core is only available on Thuban chips and comes into play only during single-threaded and some multi-threaded applications. On a six-core CPU, this means that some of the cores need to be idle. ASUS, on the other hand, claims that its Turbo Unlocker can perform similarly, pushing one core up by 500MHz and up to four cores by 400MHz, in single-threaded and multi-threaded applications, respectively. It is in highly threaded applications that the feature stands out, however. Specifically, even when all six cores are used, Turbo Unlocker can drive clocks higher by 200MHz per core.
Enthusiasts will undoubtedly be quite eager to test out the new technology, but mainstream users may be even more interested in it once they find out that Turbo Unlocker is not limited to six-core chips. In fact, on AMD 800 Series motherboards, it will apply to dual-core, triple-core and quad-core models as well (Phenom II X2, X3 and X4). An official announcement has not yet been made, however, though it should not be far off.
