Quote Originally Posted by dess View Post
According to some slides, it elevates half of the cores' clocks (while putting the rest to sleep), so 3 of them, in case of Thuban. I don't know about an application that runs only 2 or 3 heavyweight threads, and never more, though.


20% is not much for an overclocker, but for the rest of people, 20% increase in the clock frequency has its costs in money, until now (considering single or "lightly" threaded apps). And in CPU-bound situations in games, it can bring even that much of increase in fps, which is "a lot"...

They can't clock all the cores high, because they have to take care of the power-consumption, too - which is definitely a thing to consider, for many people. Otherways they would have to sell these CPU's with a TDP of one or two classes higher (125W -> 140W, 95W -> 125W).

Or, they could leave the clocks in the lows untouched, but then they could only sell them for rendering, videoediting, etc. and to overclockers.
I know but they could easily fit a 3.4 Ghz or even 3.6 Ghz native 6-core in if they raised the TDP envelope to 140w. 3.2 @ 125 is just like the 955 and 965.