It's easy to see how this works when just one or two cores are being actively used whatever power the other two or three cores would have consumed can be redirected over to the active cores, allowing them to run at higher speeds. Basically, if the current application workload isn't keeping all four cores fully busy and pushing right up against the chip's TDP (Thermal Design Power) limit, Turbo Boost can increase the clock speed of each core individually to get more performance out of the chip. The key to this dramatic claim is a feature called Turbo Boost technology. In his IDF session announcing these parts, Intel Vice President Mooly Eden said the best of these parts, the 2GHz Core i7-920XM Extreme Edition, is 'the fastest quad-core processor, the fastest dual-core processor, and the fastest single-core processor'- all in one chip.

Intel VP Mooly Eden shows off the new Core i7 Mobile processor and its companion I/O controller at the Intel Developer Forum. They're huge high-performance quad-core chips with Hyper-Threading, support for two channels of DDR3-1333 DRAM, and an on-die PCI Express controller for the fastest possible connection to discrete graphics chips.

The new 'Clarksfield' Core i7 Mobile processors introduced at the Intel Developer Forum last week are certainly very impressive. Intel promotes the Turbo Boost technology in its new Core i7 Mobile processors as a way to adapt to the needs of the software and get more performance from the chip, but this isn't the real reason the technology exists.

How to enable turbo boost cpu speed