AMD will introduce a new technology called “Turbo CORE” in its new Thuban and Zosma CPUs. By overclocking active CPU cores when running single threaded applications, performance can be increased without an increase in power consumption. This new feature however is hardware-based and as such isn’t supported by today’s CPUs. This is something that ASUS is said to have overcome, using its own Turbo Unlocker technology. This technology gives an increase in performance for the current line of AMD’s Black Edition family of CPUs.
The reason that Turbo Unlocker only supports Black Edition CPUs is that it needs a CPU with unlocked multipliers, as the performance increase comes from changing the multiplier to a higher value. This is done automatically when the workload of the CPU is very high. The benefit of only increasing the multiplier is that it’s only the CPU frequency that is changed, in comparison to bus overclocking which basically overclocks the whole system and can add to instability issues when not using components that can handle the increased frequency.
ASUS argues that its Turbo Unlocker technology is able to give higher performance increases than AMD’s own Turbo CORE technology. This is done by increasing the frequency of all cores when they’re all under a high workload, even if the increase is much smaller.
The Turbo Unlocker has an interesting approach to increase performance on AMD-based systems. As it’s an software-based product supported by all ASUS’s AMD motherboards, is still has to be activated manually as opposed to AMD’s Turbo CORE. As to usage, we’re a bit unsure. We feel that most people who would be considering using this technology, would just overclock the computer instead.
