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I can't quite tell from the current replies if the mechanism of what is going on is clear. Apologies if this is redundant. What is happening is a thermal mana

I can't quite tell from the current replies if the mechanism of what is going on is clear. Apologies if this is redundant. What is happening is a thermal management issue. "turbo" lets you boost briefly to speeds that will cause the chip to overheat if run long enough. Their idea to manage this was to play hot potato with which core gets baked. As soon as it reaches critical temperatures, they turbo up another core and the OS migrates threads. So one part of the chip gets hot while the other cools off, and then they continue back and forth.Personally I'm surprised this doesn't crack silicon or pop bonds. With regards to overclocking, I guess I didn't know you could overclock a single core? Is this pinned or is it adjusting what the "turbo" frequency is? In anycase, if there is a differential in speeds among cores, the hot potato thing will probably happen. And if you overclock it will probably happen more. The only way to combat this would be to either mess with the windows cpu driver and put your cpu at risk, or make the speed homogenous among all cores.

lbenes 9y ago
> mess with the windows cpu driver and put your cpu at risk AFAIK, the thermal throttling is hardware controlled. I doubt you can override the protections in software. Driver tweaking may help
JoshTriplett 9y ago
> "turbo" lets you boost briefly to speeds that will cause the chip to overheat if run long enough. Their idea to manage this was to play hot potato with which core gets baked. As soon as it reaches critical temperatures, they turbo up another core and the OS migrates threads. This is not an accurate description of how turbo works. You don't have to migrate away from a core and switch to another. Turbo simply recognizes that if you have a multi-core processor, and many of the cores stay asleep and don't contribute to power and thermal demands, then the remaining cores can take up the slack. The more cores stay asleep, the faster the remainder can go.

lbenes 9y ago

> mess with the windows cpu driver and put your cpu at risk AFAIK, the thermal throttling is hardware controlled. I doubt you can override the protections in software. Driver tweaking may help

JoshTriplett 9y ago

> "turbo" lets you boost briefly to speeds that will cause the chip to overheat if run long enough. Their idea to manage this was to play hot potato with which core gets baked. As soon as it reaches critical temperatures, they turbo up another core and the OS migrates threads. This is not an accurate description of how turbo works. You don't have to migrate away from a core and switch to another. Turbo simply recognizes that if you have a multi-core processor, and many of the cores stay asleep and don't contribute to power and thermal demands, then the remaining cores can take up the slack. The more cores stay asleep, the faster the remainder can go.