Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

What I'm not happy about is the marketing around turbo boost.

You know how ISPs used to sell "up to X Mbps"? Same idea. Your chip will turbo boost "up to 6.00 GHz".

It's basically automated overclocking, and as you learned, sometimes it can't even do it in a stable fashion. Some of those chips will never clock "up to 6.00 GHz" but they didn't lie. "up to"



It's particularly bad when they stop telling you what clock speeds are achievable with more than one core active. At best these days you get a "base clock" spec that's very slow that doesn't correspond to any operating mode that occurs in real life. You used to get a table of x GHz for y active cores, but then the core counts got too large and the limits got fuzzier.

And laptops have another layer of bullshit, because the theoretical boost clocks the chip is capable of will in practice be limited by the power delivery and cooling provided by that specific machine, and the OEMs never tell you what those limits are. So they'll happily take an extra $200 for another 100MHz that you'll never see for more than a few milliseconds while a different model with a slower-on-paper CPU with better cooling can easily be more than 20% faster.


Yes, this is the situation for my dell laptop's i7-1165G7. Alleged turbo boost to 4.7ghz! In reality, it will hit that for a sec and then throttle to ~1ghz. I had to disable the turbo boost AND two cores in bios to let it even achieve ~2.0ghz speeds consistently. It's a total scam. Turns out my 8th-Gen i5 laptop is almost the same speed on benchmarks, just because it's a few mm thicker with better cooling.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: