Efficiency: Optimizing The Clock Rate Of AMD's Phenom II X6

Turbo CORE In Action

Here’s a quick summary of the Turbo CORE activity you see for workloads that require one, three, four, or six threads.

A single-threaded application will have the Phenom II X6 operate at a maximum Turbo Core speed of 3.6 GHz

Software that runs on three threads has the processor increase core speed for the three cores to 3.6 GHz.

Once four cores are required, the system automatically switches back to 3.2 GHz clock speed for all four active cores. In such a scenario, the six-core Thuban has no real advantage over the quad-core Phenom II X4 at the same clock speeds.

If all six cores are in action, you’ll see a constant 3.2 GHz clock speed.