The Frequency Behavior of Intel's CPUs is complex and is governed by multiple mechanisms that perform dynamic frequency scaling.

Overview

With the increasing transistor budget new features are added and the overall core grows in capabilities. Unfortunately, the power constraints have remained the same and in many situations have gotten more restrictive. The result is that despite the exponentially increasing density, the dark silicon's area is growing just as fast.

Intel has implemented a number of mechanisms into their architectures to extract additional performance through higher frequency whenever the power and thermal budgets allow.

• Dynamic Acceleration Technology (DAT) - Introduced with Modified Pentium M/Core 2006
• Turbo Boost Technology (TBT) - Introduced with Nehalem in 2008
  • Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 (TBT 2.0) - Introduced with Sandy Bridge in 2011
• Turbo Boost Max Technology (TBMT) - Introduced with Broadwell E in 2016