ITPEC IP October 2024 Question 13

Raising the core frequency while heat and power have margin — turbo boost speeds the cores up automatically as long as the CPU stays within its thermal and power limits.

A CPU has a base clock frequency that it can sustain under full load. When the load leaves headroom, for example only some cores are busy and temperature and power consumption are below their limits, turbo boost raises the operating frequency of the active cores above the base to speed up processing, and lowers it again as the limits are approached.

Answer (b)

Why not others:

• •(a) — describes cache memory, the fast memory between the CPU and the slower main memory
• •(c) — describes a multi-core processor, which runs processes in parallel on several cores
• •(d) — describes distributed processing, such as grid computing, that spreads work over the CPUs of many computers

Key rule: Turbo boost changes the clock frequency of the existing cores within heat and power limits; it adds no cores, no cache and no computers.

Computer Component · AI-written, may contain errors