Bought a MacBook Pro 9,2 with i7 upgrade in Thailand. According to the Intel Power gadget, it shows that the max clock speed is 3.4GHz under heavy load, which leads me to believe that it is the maximum clock speed of this chip. But I thought it was a maximum of 3.6GHz on the i7 processor upgrade for the mid 2012 model?
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
What does "About this Mac" say about the exact specifications of your processor. It's quite possible that the Macs sold in Thailand (or any other country where temperature can get quite hot) have been underclocked to prevent them from overheating.
Hello,
Thanks for your reply. Curiosity got the better of me and I think I've found the answer.
I read that 'turbo boost' operates in a certain way, depending on the number of cores that are active, which in turn, determines the stepping for turbo boost. To my understanding, there are a set of numbers relating to turbo boost ratios as: x/x/x/x where each number is a multiplier of clock speed for the number of cores in use, which in turn determines how much it is overclocked.
According to this website here, it states that for the Intel Core i7-3520M that is present in the MacBook Pro 9,2 model, when two cores are turned off (dual core), it turbo boosts to a maximum of 3.4GHz. If three cores are turned off (single core), it turbo boosts to a maximum of 3.6GHz
I experimented by manually turning off the three of four active processor cores and running something intensive. Low and behold, 3.6GHz.
References:
Turbo boosts up to 3.4GHz, not 3.6GHz. What's happening here?
