Intel Will No Longer Provide Per-Core Turbo Frequencies
Ok so this is an interesting bit of news. In the wake of a massive CPU launch that has all but redefined desktop CPU performance Intel is telling the world that they are not going to publish "per core turbo frequencies" and will instead let the board makers figure it out on their own.
In a way this mirrors what NVIDIA has done with their Turbo 3.0 where the top frequency is based on the environment and power demands so if you have a favorable environment then your PC will run faster. It also makes tuning a motherboard pretty much impossible.
Extremetech asked Intel "What the F dude?"
[W]e’re no longer disclosing this level of detail as its proprietary to Intel. Intel only specifies processor frequencies for base and single-core Turbo in our processor marketing and technical collateral, such as ARK, and not the multi-core Turbo frequencies. We’re aligning communications to be consistent. All Turbo frequencies are opportunistic given their dependency on system configuration and workloads.
~Intel
Given that Intel now has a multitude of Turbo configurations it will be interesting to see just how much control "we" are given when it comes to overclocking and system tuning. For instance there are already 7Ghz scores on HWBOT.org AND we know that Coffee Lake is still using the crappy TIM under the heatspreader so it is possible to overclock using current configurations and getting there will require that you delid the CPU else it will likely thermally throttle due to excessive heat at the CPU core.
There are several reasons to view this change as a negative. First, not all Intel CPUs are equally aggressive when it comes to their Turbo scaling, even if they have the same or similar Turbo ranges. This is one reason why the gap between chips can be wider than they’d otherwise be. The Core i7-8700K, for example, has a peak all-core frequency of 4.3GHz on six cores, which is fairly close to its peak frequency of 4.7GHz for single-core.
I will be interested to see how this all pans out and if the update really has any effect on what consumers and enthusiasts get with the final product. In fact, this announcement could really be an official change to how they write up their tech specs.
Related Web URL: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/257044-intel...
