Turbo Mode Is Back!

      by Wyatt Walter

For all of you geeks out there who miss being able to hit the turbo button on your 386, fret no more! While there’s no actual turbo button, (which is saddening, I know) Intel has announced at the Intel Developer Forum that the new “Nehalem” processors will come equipped with a turbo mode. The Nehalem chips which are slated to ship in Q4 of 2008 come with four cores, but use Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology to make the system perform as if there were eight. The new turbo mode will allow the processor to turn off power to certain cores when they are not needed, thus reducing power consumption. Power usage becomes extremely important in laptops where battery life can be greatly increased and in data centers where a company may have hundreds or thousands of systems running 24×7.

Intel also showed off the first quad-core processor built for mobile computers, the mobile Intel Core 2 Extreme processor.

For the record, the older “Turbo mode” was slightly different. It was for slowing down the speeds of the machine to be compatible with some older software.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Aug 20th, 2008

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