CORE Or Boost? AMD's And Intel's Turbo Features Dissected

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Intel arms its Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs with Turbo Boost. AMD's hexa-core Phenom II X6 chips sport Turbo CORE. Both technologies dynamically increase performance based on perceived workloads and available thermal headroom. Which one does the better job?

Test Setup And Benchmarks

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System Hardware
Hardware Details
Performance Benchmarks
Motherboard (Socket AMD3) Asus Crosshair IV Formula (Rev. 1.0), Chipset: AMD 890FX, BIOS: 0505 (04/02/2010
Motherboard (Socket LGA 1366) Intel DX58SO (Rev. 1.0), Chipset: Intel X58, BIOS: 5000 (02/16/2010)
CPU AMD I AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (45 nm, 3.2 GHz, 6 x 512 KB L2 and 6 MB L3 Cache, TDP 125 W, Rev. C3)
CPU Intel II Intel Core i7-980X Extreme (32 nm, 3.33 GHz, 6 x 256 KB L2 and 12 MB L3 Cache, TDP 130 W)
RAM DDR3 (dual) 2 x 2 GB DDR3-1600 (OCZ3G2000LV4GK 8-8-8-24)
RAM DDR3 (triple) 3 x 2 GB DDR3-1600 (Corsair TR3X6G-1600C8D 8-8-8-24)
Graphics Sapphire Radeon HD 5850, GPU: Cypress (725 MHz), Graphics RAM: 1024 MB GDDR5 (2000 MHz), Stream Processors: 1440
Hard Drive Western Digital VelociRaptor, 300 GB (WD3000HLFS), 10 000 RPM, SATA 3Gb/s, 16 MB Cache
Power Supply PC Power & Cooling, Silencer 750EPS12V 750W
System Software & Drivers
Operating System Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Edition Updated on 2010-03-03
Drivers and Settings
Intel Chipset Drivers Chipset Installation Utility Ver. 9.1.1.1025
Intel Storage Drivers Matrix Storage Drivers Ver. 8.​9.​0.​1023