LAST WEEK WE reported about AMD’s Turbo Core, which is a feature of the upcoming Thuban based processors that allows half of the cores to go into idle mode while the remaining cores are overclocked to boost the performance for poorly threaded applications. It now appears that Asus isn’t satisfied with the performance boost on offer, nor the fact that it’s limited to Thuban CPU’s, so Asus has gone and done its own version called Turbo Unlocker.
We found a few leaked Asus slides over at Donanimhaber that covers it all fairly briefly, but we’re going to try to get hold of Asus for a better explanation as to how it all works. Turbo Unlocker is part of Asus’ TurboV EVO software and Asus claims that it works with all Phenom II Black Edition CPU’s, no matter the core count, as well as the upcoming Thuban based Phenom II X6 processors. Judging by the slides, Asus isn’t limited to three or six cores, as Turbo Unlocker appears to work with a single active core all the way up to the full six cores.
Asus claims overclocking speeds of 500MHz+ in single core mode, 400MHz+ in two to four core mode and 200MHz+ with all six cores enabled. Asus also promises to stay within the TDP for any given CPU. Performance boosts for a dual core Phenom II X2 555 BE is claimed to be somewhere between 10-12 percent in one of the slides, where with a 6-core CPU the performance gain is a bit more modest with all cores enabled, at somewhere between two and eight percent depending on the application.
Turbo Unlocker works with all of Asus’ 890GX, 890FX, 880G and 870 based motherboards, although many of the models in the list have yet to launch and the 890GX motherboards will require a BIOS upgrade before it works. With Core Unlocker it seems like Asus might very well have a winner on its hands here, at least for those who don’t want to mess around with overclocking. Maybe AMD should have a chat with some of Asus’ engineers and see if they can’t implement a better version of Turbo Core in its CPUs.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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