27" iMac Intel Core 7 question

[alra111]

Greetings to all,

Firstly, I hope I'm posting this question in the proper forum. I wanted to ask something about my 27" Core i7 iMac I just got.

Under technical specifications, at the Apple website, it says "2.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with 8MB shared L3 cache; Turbo Boost dynamic performance up to 3.46GHz; Hyper-Threading for up to eight virtual cores." I was wondering if any of you knew what this Turbo Boost performance means, how can I see whether it is taking place, or how can activate/de-activate it!

Thanks,

Rafael

 

[DeltaMac]

If you’re using an application that doesn’t need every core, Turbo Boost shuts off the idle cores while simultaneously increasing the speed of the active ones. So, you could have processor speed of up to 3.46 GHz under certain conditions - but not all cores can be in use. So, easy enough - when less cores are needed, the processor speed would scale up to that maximum of 3.46 GHz.
I think the Hyper-threading is more interesting - where each core can share workload to two virtual processors, and therefore allowing more tasks to be done simultaneously.