Posted on Tuesday, December 20 2005 @ 0:54 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Charlie from The Inquirer talks about a new problem with Intel's numbering scheme, caused by the Foxton feature of Intel's Pentium M Yonah. This feature automatically overclocks the processor if circumstances permit it too boost performance.
Lets take the auto-overclocking in Yonah for example. If you buy a CPU at 2.16GHz, you expect it to act like the rest of the 2.16GHz CPUs. If that CPU can ramp up to 2.33 when circumstances permit with the laptop equivalent of Foxton, how fast is it? 2.16 or 2.33? Before you write to say it is a model T243-7aR//763T243-7aR//763, please choke on something before you put your fingers on the keyboard.
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Now, to make matters worse, what do you do if production variances mean that CPU1 will spend 10 per cent of its life OC'd, and CPU2 will be there 20% of the time? Is CPU 1 binned at a higher spec than 2? Is it marketed as faster? What about when you add in a laptop with a more efficient cooling system, are the CPUs in each one still the 'same' since the environment affects the cores in a measurable way?
More details over
here.
