I'd hardly call that an ace. All it's gonna do make it run to hot

These chips will be less slower compared to the Intels. A few tenths of GHZ will not catch up.
They are still in deep performance doo doo.

Ok i guess you can call that an Ace but Intel has a Shotgun named Nahalem up their sleeve.

So my question with this is... these "Free" clock speed increases, do they come at the cost of the warranty? My assumption being an overclocker is yes they do. Also, the black edition is like buying intel's extreme version processors which, as you should know, has no multiplier lock. I would say it's no "trick up their sleeve" if it comes at the cost of the factory warranty.

anyone remember turbo button? i had one of those. it was sepouse to switch between 66 MHz and 133 MHz on my pc. yep, it was that long ago! 133 MHz pc was in "what for do you need that fast computer" category at that time.
turbo button and cool indicator was mounted on the front panel of the pc. it was salesman's favorite button. "look its 66.. and now its 133! WOW!!!" I never was able to figure out any practical use of the button. why one would need two speed pc? it is not a car! after all!
on my next trip to a computer store should i expect turbo button comeback. "look its 2.4" click "its 3.2 now! WOW!!" "The actual overclocking is done...simply by pressing a physical button...It just does not get any more better than this."

PS: i forgot, i even had 6 / 12 MHz (not GHz) pc with same turbo button. it was that long ago. was amd keeping an ace up its sleeve for like 20 years? it really just does not get any more better than this.

I'm actually pretty impressed with this marketing.

Since when is performance boost a bad thing? Don't even compare Phenom to Nehalem because you can't compare a $200 cpu to a well-over $2000 cpu. You are all Intel fanboys.

I remember having one of those

good old times

So basically the people who brought a SB700 MOBO are stuck fighting to get to 3 GHZ.

Wow, and here I thought that AMD couldn't "take it up the rectum" any more, INTEL is really "sticking it" to AMD.

What good is a 3.2 GHZ phenom compared to a Q6600 that can hit 4GHZ and IS CHEAPER THEN THE PHENOM?

Congratulations AMD you've just lost another customer. And to think since 1996 I haven't had an INTEL PC (well it's time to go back to INTEL). I was really hoping you could turn things around with the 9850 BE.

This feature seems to me like the processor is manufacture able to run on 3.2ghz. Just that they have lock out the capability.

with the new chipset the full performance will be unleashed.

I mean at least it is still very interesting if this overclocking (2.8 -> 3.2ghz) can be done without any tweaking of memory and core voltage.

perhaps we only can wait and see more information come in near future before we can make any justification.

Anything left to say?

There was a turbo button on the Taiwanese PC clone I bought in 1986. It would switch my 8086 (the first x86 processor, yeah baby!) from 4.77 to 8Mhz. The funny thing... I hardly even knew what it did until months after I got the computer (I was 12 years old and I had my hands full with Flight Simulator 2 and King's Quest 1... aaaah the good old days...). I could tell the difference in speed though as the boot sequence included a memory check of my 512Kb of RAM and it was twice as fast at 8Mhz. That said I'm pretty sure back then this was not overclocking but rather downclocking to 4.77 when the button was off.

Are these coming out soon? AMD better hurry up and get their 45nm process ramped up... Once Nehalem gets here, it's going to be VERY difficult for AMD. Even more difficult than it is now...

If you buy a new computer or rebuild your barebones every six to twelve months, your opinion of this technology may be slanted. How do you know this isn't part of a grand scheme to slingshot AMD in the dominant position? Maybe the current processors are capable of speeds past 5ghz in their current spin and they are disabled in all these intentional ways. This way, AMD stays only slightly less in performance to INTEL for at least a year...just enough time to scare Intel into blowing all their resources with new technology to get faster....while AMD remains competitively prices and the average consumer keeps buying them cause extreme speed isn’t a concern. They then unleash the fury of their new 32nm chip technology that is five times faster and twice as overclockable.


Haha, who are we kidding...AMD is screwed and they're using every gimmick in the book to keep their processors interesting to the barebones market share.

The old "Underclock" button was so you could play games designed for the old 4.77 MHz computers.

The Turbo buttong was a compatibility item...programmers didn't have the ability (or rather didn't write in some cases) speed detection/scaling into their code. A program written to run smooth on an 8mhz machine would run absurdly fast on a 12mhz machine. When encountering applications that were meant for an 8mhz machine you just needed to hit the turbo button and it would run as intended.

(8 and 12mhz were used as examples... obviously other combinations existed)

A button found on earlier (386 and 486) PC computers that would increase or decrease the performance of the computer. This button was needed for backwards compatibility in older programs and games that were written for a specific speed of computer. When faster computers were released, because the programs were written for a slower speed of computer, it would cause the program to run extremely fast, often making them unusable. Using the turbo button a user could slow the computer down allowing them to use these programs.

They stole this from Sega!!! ;)

This is an interesting idea and pretty good marketing ploy.

I wonder how this will all be deployed though. It seems to me you need first a black edition that can hold stable at 3.2GHz and a motherboard that can handle the higher TDP.

If AMD can get 3.0 and 3.2GHz stable processors out the door then just market them as new "black editions".Then charge more money for those.

I liked the turbo button idea (I had one of these back in the day) but maybe they should implement it via AMD Overdrive utility? seems to me if you are going for a black edition anyway, you are most likely an enthusiast and as such someone willing to push the processor as far as it can go stably (ie: Experiment). Pushing the little button or getting extra speed without effort just takes the fun out of the thing.
The average mainstream user probably won't notice anything.

Many games written for the 4.77MHz IBM PC just used an instruction delay loop for timing purposes (execute the NOP instruction 30 times for example). As the 'closes' got faster and faster, many of the older games became unplayable. The 'turbo' button's only useful purpose was to slow the computer down to play these games.

anyone remember turbo button? i had one of those. it was sepouse to switch between 66 MHz and 133 MHz on my pc. yep, it was that long ago! 133 MHz pc was in "what for do you need that fast computer" category at that time.
turbo button and cool indicator was mounted on the front panel of the pc. it was salesman's favorite button. "look its 66.. and now its 133! WOW!!!" I never was able to figure out any practical use of the button. why one would need two speed pc? it is not a car! after all!
on my next trip to a computer store should i expect turbo button comeback. "look its 2.4" click "its 3.2 now! WOW!!" "The actual overclocking is done...simply by pressing a physical button...It just does not get any more better than this."

PS: i forgot, i even had 6 / 12 MHz (not GHz) pc with same turbo button. it was that long ago. was amd keeping an ace up its sleeve for like 20 years? it really just does not get any more better than this.

The turbo button was there for a reason. There were some games that ran too fast if you didn't down clock it. Back in the dos days, early programs didn't recognize or were not able to adjust the game(s) if you had a fast processor. I remember playing what was it called thexder... something like that, and Wing Commander. I'd play Wing Commander on Turbo, and if I did that with the other game, it ran too fast for me, so I had to de-turbo my cpu.

CPUs and computers are much smarter today, they can down clock within the program. And if you have a dos emulator and wanted to play some of your old games on a 2 gig cpu, you'd have to use that software to down clock your CPU. I remember a couple of years ago loading in Ultima 4 for nostalgia. I was not able to control the balloon at all, and the game was moving so fast, I saw many passes, in 2 second of me idling.

That's what the Turbo button was used for.

not only a single core - Venice was going from 1,8 to 3ghz but even now when you OC a phenom by 400mhz it will NEVER beat a intel Q6600 G0 which easily goes from 2,4 to 3,4. not to mention that a Q6600 beats a OCed Phenom while running at 2,4.

And this comes from a AMD fan (disappointed after amd dropping the S939 after all the promises)

AMD has inexplicably refused to never specify the ACTUAL CLOCK SPEED of the processor for many years now, instead opting to specify clock performance equivalents, forcing us to look up in a chart what the actual clock speed of their processors is. Why not just call a spade a spade? Now THAT would be refreshing. Regardless AMD is in a tough spot. They carved a powerful niche creating powerful desktop and server processors for cheaper than Intel. Now Intel is wiping the floor with them. AMD is now 18-24 months behind the curve on multi-core processors. AMD is all but gone from the high-end latest generation x86/64-bit server market.

Already can be done on Intel chips, its called the BSEL PAd mod.

I remember having a turbo button on my pc that would actually mess with old games because the actual gameplay would be faster. 'California Games', for example, would do this iirc.

AMD chips have always been the ones that overclock the easiest and the black editions have always been multiplier unlocked -- this is no ace up the sleeve as overclocking is pushing the chip and motherboard harder (voltage stabilization)

AMD still has the ACE that their chips optimize x86 code more into RISC than any other chip and will extend this with SSE5. Then, AMDs also have the higher speed direct memory controller on chip that Intel hesitates at.

Closer to an ACE up the sleeve, but already announced is that with the ATI acquisition, high quality gpus can be attached to the processor for quicker rendering actions, See TMG on gpu vs. cpu performance.

This blog is pointless and poorly researched.

@Just a Person: Look, AMD architecture is different than Intel. AMD has more power-per-GHz than Intel processors, which is why you will see on minimum specs something like, "2.8GHz Intel P4 or better or 1.8GHz Athlon or better". A 4GHz Intel processor is not necessarily better than a 3.2GHz AMD. This doesn't mean that AMD is better, really, just that hey don't derive power from raw frequency.

Kgb, here's a huge tip. Stop saying "more better". It's just not right. Makes you sound like a moron.

Now, with that out of the way. I don't think the "turbo" button would be coming back. CPU's scale themselves now.