Evaluation of the Intel® Core™ i7 Turbo Boost feature
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Authors:: Charles, James; Jassi, Preet; Ananth, Narayan S; Sadat, Abbas; Fedorova, Alexandra
Title:: Evaluation of the Intel® Core™ i7 Turbo Boost feature
Date:: 2009
URL:: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5306782
DOI:: 10.1109/IISWC.2009.5306782
Charles, J., Jassi, P., Ananth, N. S., Sadat, A., & Fedorova, A. (2009). Evaluation of the Intel® CoreTM i7 Turbo Boost feature. 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC), 188–197. https://doi.org/10.1109/IISWC.2009.5306782
The Intel® Core™ i7 processor code named Nehalem has a novel feature called Turbo Boost which dynamically varies the frequencies of the processor's cores. The frequency of a core is determined by core temperature, the number of active cores, the estimated power and the estimated current consumption. We perform an extensive analysis of the Turbo Boost technology to characterize its behavior in varying workload conditions. In particular, we analyze how the activation of Turbo Boost is affected by inherent properties of applications (i.e., their rate of memory accesses) and by the overall load imposed on the processor. Furthermore, we analyze the capability of Turbo Boost to mitigate Amdahl's law by accelerating sequential phases of parallel applications. Finally, we estimate the impact of the Turbo Boost technology on the overall energy consumption. We found that Turbo Boost can provide (on average) up to a 6% reduction in execution time but can result in an increase in energy consumption up to 16%. Our results also indicate that Turbo Boost sets the processor to operate at maximum frequency (where it has the potential to provide the maximum gain in performance) when the mapping of threads to hardware contexts is sub-optimal.
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We found that Turbo Boost can provide (on average) up to a 6% reduction in execution time but can result in an increase in energy consumption up to 16%.
Turbo Boost Technology opportunistically boosts the frequencies of the cores on the multi-core Core i7 processor. Our isolation, paired and saturation tests showed that Turbo Boost can provide on average up to a 6% reduction in execution time. Turbo Boost Technology had the most impact on performance when the scheduling was not optimal; however, in all cases, Turbo Boost enhanced performance.
Turbo Boost also resulted in a significant increase in energy consumption because the processor requires a higher voltage to operate at Turbo Boost frequencies. However, current processors also support low power sleep states where they consume very little power.