AMD FX-Series Processors Can Turbo Up to 1GHz over Base Frequency

AMD's recently introduced Turbo Core 2.0 technology will allow the company's upcoming FX-Series desktop chips, based on the Bulldozer architecture, to reach clocks speeds 1GHz higher than their base frequency when only half the cores are used by the operating system.

The AMD Turbo Core 2.0 technology made its debut earlier today when the company officially released its first accelerated processing units based on the Llano architecture.This technology uses the advanced power gating features newly introduced in the Llano processors as well as the information available regarding the workloads handled by the CPU in order to dynamically adjust the operating frequencies of the processing cores.This way, the cores can exceed their nominal clock speed for short amounts of time to improve the chips performance especially in lower threaded applications.According to a slide recently published by Donanim Haber, this technology enables AMD's upcoming FX-Series processors to increase their operating speed by as much as 1GHz, when only half of the cores are active.This slide that was presented, uses an eight-core CPU to demonstrate how Turbo Core 2.0 works, but this technology will also be available in AMD's quad-core and six-core processor models.

Bulldozer is the code-name given to AMD's upcoming high-performance architecture that has been in development for over four years now.

Unlike the company's previous designs, Bulldozer will use a new approach that relies on a modular architecture. Each module includes two processing cores, as well as other components, and these can be paired together to form CPUs with up to eight computing cores.The first chips built on this architecture were expected to arrive in June and targeted the desktop market, but it now seems like AMD is having troubles with achieving the desired clock speeds.As a result, the company officially announced that the first Zambezi FX CPUs won't arrive until August or September of 2011.

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