In short, in multi-core processors, cores not doing much can still use power. So, it's better to use, for example, a couple of cores more efficiently than four cores inefficiently.
Turbo mode is enabled by a "power control unit which is an integrated microcontroller which only works on power management," said Rajesh Kumar, an Intel Fellow, who spoke during Gelsinger's keynote. There are about 1 million transistors dedicated solely to power management, Kumar said.
"Turbo mode requires no operating system intervention. It is fully detected and managed by the hardware. If it has detected an idle core, it is able to reallocate that power budget to the other cores," Gelsinger said in an interview after his keynote.
On another front, Intel showed the first eight-core Nehalem chip. "This is the first showing of the eight-core Nehalem-EX," Gelsinger said in his keynote. He said the chip is a monolithic design, meaning that all eight cores are on one piece of silicon.
Nehalem-EP, or Nehalem Efficient Performance, will be a quad-core chip for mainstream servers and workstations. What Intel traditionally calls two-socket servers, Gelsinger said.
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