What is turbo boost?

On the Macs TB is automatic and only comes into play when the CPU is stressed. Essentially it's just a form of mild over-clocking that runs the CPU at a slightly faster speed. You have no control over it.

Turbo Boost happens on a lightly-loaded Mac. It turns the clock speed up higher for faster performance. This cannot be done on a heavily-loaded Mac because it would overheat and shut itself down.

It's already on.

Just

http://www.bing.com/search?q=What+is+turbo+boost

Top hits:

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology — On-Demand Processor …

www.intel.com/.../turbo-boost/turbo-boost-technology.html

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology provides even performance when needed on the latest-generation Intel® microarchitecture code name Sandy Bridge.

Intel Turbo Boost - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Turbo_Boost

• History ·
• Example ·
• Monitoring Turbo Boost

Intel Turbo Boost is a technology implemented by Intel in certain versions of their Nehalem - and Sandy Bridge -based CPUs, including Core i5 and Core i7 that

Bing.... BING! COME ON!

So, what I have been reading is that we can't manually change the processors performance. On non-apple products you would changes these setting in the bios. Why are you wanting to use turbo boost? (Shedding some more light on the question may help us give you a better solution.)

mleep: "On non-apple products you would changes these setting in the bios. Why are you wanting to use turbo boost? "

Surely the more interesting question is why you would ever want to disable turbo-boost!

If minimising power consumption is a primary concern (say, for laptops or in server farms) why would you buy a more expensive, turbo-boostable CPU, and then disable turbo-boosting, when you could buy a cheaper, lower-speed CPU, without the turbo-boosting ability, in the first place?

This really puzzled me, so I went a-googling and found this page, which describes a turbo-boosted Microsoft/Intel system that overheated when running some game.

All Intel i5 and i7 processors have hardware sensors, that (when used properly) warn the BIOS or EFI when the CPU is overheating. Given this, a system that keeps itself in turbo-boost mode, despite dangerously high CPU temperatures, sounds like it was written by someone who's incompetent. (I could well be wrong about this and would appreciate feedback if I am.)

Provided you stick to Intel's design guidelines for software and hardware (heat sinks!), I cannot imagine why you would ever want turbo-boost disabled.

Apple has some of the slickest battery management, power management and temperature management systems in the business.

You make a valid point. What I was trying to get at was: Is he currently experiencing performance issues.

Just looking back at my usage, I've never seen my i7 hit 100%.

Lost power would be a concern but since apple products change these settings automatically this is not an issue.

The way I thought overclocking works was more of an on and off thing not a constantly adjusting thing.

Game play would be a time I would want to have the option to manually adjust the settings.

I'm thinking they're about average. Right about one thing, they do have nice power management settings. You're a little off about the temperature management, these things get HOT. "Wrong" says the man who cooked an egg on the back of his MacBook.

Turbo boost is purely a marketing gimmick.

It boosts the CPU's GHZ when only one or two cores has a load. Unfortunately, Apple's OS naturally spreads loads (threads) across all available cores evenly. Even at dead idle, all cores have 1-3% load.

That means "turbo boost" will never actually kick in except when a completely single-threaded task is being processed. There are very few applications in existance that are not multi-threaded.

A few months late, but what the heck...

TurboBoost is pretty interesting. On my particular processor, a 4 core i7 3820QM, the clock speed is listed as 2.7 GHz. Using Intel Power Gadget I can monitor the clock speed and the power usage. Apparently the 2.7 GHz rating is simply a nominal rating and has little to do what is actually happening at any given time.

If my computer is idling and just a few background tasks are running, the clock speed can drop to 1.7 to 2.2 GHz and the power used by the CPU is in the single digits, ~5-7 Watts.

On the other hand if the current task is more demanding, the clock speed can increase up to 1000 MHz over the nominal speed depending on the number of cores in use. It will do 3.7 GHz with 1 core, 3.6 GHz with 2 and 3.5 GHz when 3 or 4 cores are running,

I'm currently doing a video conversion and the CPU is really cranking away. All 4 cores are running at 3.40 to 3.50 GHz and the CPU power usage is varying between roughly 47 Watts and 50.5 Watts. The CPU temp is at 100C° with the fans running at full speed. It also runs like this when I'm running SETI@home and processing 8 data streams at once.

BitterCreek is correct!

Are you using or have you tried Geekbench 3.01? it does longer test and single core.

A lot of apps have only been or can only be single-thread, OS X can't change that (and when there was a single thread like when I used Nisus it would show one core at 110% which is I assume Apple-ese for turbo. Intel is marketing a feature but snake oil, no. And just like the temps will instantly jump 10-20*C and just as quickly fall back down for a processor when opening files or apps, there is a lot going on constantly.

Reducing heat, power consumption, extending laptop batteries, 'sleeping' processor cores for small time slices, are also advances in processor design as a result of virtual or logical cores and threading technology.

http://www.primatelabs.com/geekbench/

I JUST downloaded GB v3.0.0 (3244, 12880 result) and have found it to be a bit buggy. I'll check primate labs in a bit for a new version.

I've been using TechTool Pro 7.0.2 to watch the actual cores, or MenuMeters to see each thread. Intel Power Gadget to show the clock frequency and power consumption graphs and smcFanControl to display the CPU temp. I got the # cores vs clock frequency data from the Intel web site.

I've yet to see the clock speed go all the way up to 3.7 GHz with only one core running, I've never even seen just one core running, they seem to run in pairs. It's hard to say since I'm using four unrelated apps, none of the software I'm using is designed exclusively to test the processor (with the exception of IPG), and I'm just running it on a typical rMBP with who-knows-what running in the background. Still, I can see that Turbo Boost is far more than just a marketing tool.

In a perfect world someone may put together a package to monitor clock frequency, power consumption, core usage, thread usage and CPU temperature all in onw window. Since Intel supplies programming examples as well as an API, I've been keeping my fingers crossed.

How do I test the speed of my processor? What app and how? Please.

Intel Power Gadget will allow you to see the current clock cpeed of your CPU and also see the wattage being used. It can be found at http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget-20. Just download the Mac version. AFAIK, it's the only software that will show you how much the clock speed varies.