IDF News: Dynamic Overclocking

I got this from the German news site of heise.com. I haven’t seen it in English news so I will try to translate the most important points.

Wimax is coming out with Montevina and is codenamed Echo Peak. As a date early 2008 is given.

Intel also shown of Intel Dynamic Acceleration (IDA) during the current IDF in Beijing. Some Merom Dual core CPUs will have the ability to overclock themselves while running single thread applications. When the 2nd core is not in use the 1st core can increase its frequency and handle single threaded applications faster. Because the 2nd CPU is downclocking at the same time it doesn’t use more power and doesn’t get too hot. The Penryns CPU (coming fall 2007) will also be able to do this.

Something’s that are not clear in the article is that “some” Merons will be able to do this. I am not sure if this is something that might not be available during the lunch and comes out a bit later or what. Maybe only the high frequency Merons can do this and will cost more. On the other hand the lower cpus should be able to do this easier.

link to site

 

If this is true, then its something that Santa Rosa buyers may like. However, practically all of the range of modern dual core processors are more than up to task of daily tasks, such as word processing and surfing the Internet. Only in some tasks that are processor intensive, will the extra clockspeed really help the processor, but most people don't really complete such tasks.

Its also similar to what AMD is planning to do on its K10 architecture. Apparently, the four cores in that can run at different clockspeeds from one another, to increase producivity in single threaded applications. Its something that could be very useful.

 

I could see this really coming in handy for games that don't have SMP patches, or programs like Photoshop that aren't dual-core optimized (or did they patch CS2?). Either way, the Core Duo is still a good architecture, even for single core apps. This is evidenced especially by Super Pi, since it isn't enabled for multiple cores, but a look at reviews on this site show that even lower clocked Core Duos will do better than Pentium Ms and Pentium 4s.