TurboBoost - Not for everyone

Being on the road a lot, one always seek new ways to improve my computer battery consumption. I own a Dell Vostro 3700 laptop with a Core i7 720QM processor, which attempts (relatively successful) to pack a high-end performance processor with a decent power consumption system.The decision to attempt and improve the battery life came shortly after purchasing the laptop, so extending the battery to 9-Cell seemed only natural. Back in November, I have upgraded the system drive to a dual drive system, an SSD system drive and a HDD storage drive, to increase the battery life even more.

So far, I have managed to push the system to its theoretical limits and currently enjoy a battery life of almost 6 hours (on a 17.3’’ LCD display), but that only happens at specific usage cases. Mostly, the computer rarely surpasses the 4:20 hour barrier while the fan constantly operates at full speed and the chassis heats up to unfriendly temperatures. I have managed to narrow the suspect list down, taking the hard drive and display adapter out from the equation, leaving the processor as the prime suspect.

By downloading Intel’s Processor ID Utility, I was able to tell my processor operated constantly 10% beyond its factory settings. Intel was able to accomplish this by introducing a new technology called TurboBoost.

TurboBoost for the masses

TurboBoost enables the processor to run above its base operating frequency via dynamic control of the CPU's clock rate. It is activate when the operating system requests the highest performance state of the processor. When workload on the processor calls for faster performance, and the processor is below its limits, the processor's clock will increase the operating frequency in regular increments as required to meet demand. Frequency increases occur in increments of 133 MHz for Nehalem microarchitecture processors and 100 MHz for Sandy Bridge microarchitecture processors. When any of the electrical or thermal limits reached, the operating frequency automatically decreases in decrements of 133 MHz/100 MHz until the processor is again operating within its design limits. Intel had started shipping its TurboBoost technology with every processor released in its successful Core series.

This means that Intel TurboBoost technology acts as if you were manually overclocking the processor frequency for various reasons (overcoming a complex task, a great computational challenge such as calculating large prime numbers etc) just for a short while, and automatically returns the values to their original state (a.k.a stock frequency).

Why complaining?

Intel manages to “guess” if the user requires more computing power by using advanced algorithms that provide statistics on which commands will be executed in the near future and acts accordingly. However, while this mechanism is extremely accurate it is not perfect.

Some browsers, such as Google Chrome, send resource allocation requests from the processor to process internet content faster, and it does that constantly. The processor, with its TurboBoost technology identifies this as a computational challenge as it should, but since it lacks the ability to see this is an ongoing action and not just a temporary process, it will initiate TurboBoost until it drops dead. As a result, the battery life reduced dramatically and the computer keeps heating up.

What can I do?

This solution is not for everyone. Although disabling TurboBoost will increase your battery life, it all comes down to how well you can profile your day-to-day usage.

Surprisingly, disabling TurboBoost is easier than you think!

All you have to do is go to your Power Options:

Press on “Change advanced power settings”

Make sure the Minimum Processor State and Maximum Processor State are equal

And you’re done!

Since disabling TurboBoost will keep your processor in a constant frequency, many cycles may go to waste. The best thing to do is to create several profiles, each with a designated function.

To get you started I will list five profiles, fit to all three Core series models:

Model	Reading	Office	Browsing	Movie Playback	Gaming
Intel Core I3	10%	10%	7%	15%	Don’t, I beg you
Intel Core I5	5%	7%	5%	10%	1%-100%
Intel Core I7	3%	5%	5%	7%	1%-100%

Conclusions

In general, your processor should not surpass the 15% mark in any case (reading, browsing and office use rarely use your processor, movie playback use your display adapter mostly).

Cheers,

at0m q[^_^]p

Just browsing

For most people, HTTP is just an address prefix since most of the heavy lifting in parsing HTTP based traffic is done using the web browser.

Browsing the internet as you may know is dominated today by five main browsers: Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera.

The scope of this article is far from explaining what benefits from using each one, and mostly it comes down to which features you like and feel comfortable with.

Most browsers today share a common ground and are compatible with most processors today and because of that, most browsers today won’t benefit substantially from a stronger, faster processor. One way getting around it is to compile a browser code using the SSE processing libraries.

SSE – Stands for Streaming SIMD (or Single Instruction, Multiple Data) Instructions, can greatly increase performance when exactly the same operations are to be performed on multiple data objects. Typical applications are digital signal processing and graphics processing. Intel had already introduced SSE libraries back in 1999, which replaced MMX and ever since it’s found in every Intel processor.

What’s the problem?

With the major advancements in processing technology, Intel had extended the SSE libraries and the current version is SSE 4.2, but most improvements were done in multimedia processing, so don’t expect seeing browsers compiled with SSE4 anytime soon. However, SSE2 displays improvements in terms of performance and can theoretically boost performance by using more current processing functions.

Why you no standard?

Since web browsers aim to the lowest common denominator, and have compatibility in mind, most browsers are compiled using SSE libraries and not SSE2. If you’re processor is a Pentium IV and up (or equivalent), there’s no reason you shouldn’t upgrade to a faster web browser. While there are several alternatives, one release outperforms them all: Pale Moon.

Shine on Pale Moon

Pale Moon aims to strike a balance between features and speed. As such, a choice has been made to consciously disable a few features that are not commonly used by the largest group of users (such as parental control and accessibility). While relying on 100% source code from Firefox, it is specifically optimized for current processors by making use of the enhanced instruction sets such as SSE2 to address several performance and stability issues.