Intel technology

Intel promotes the Turbo Boost technology in its new Core i7 Mobile processors as a way to adapt to the needs of the software and get more performance from the chip, but this isn't the real reason the technology exis
It's easy to see how this works when just one or two cores are being actively used; whatever power the other two or three cores would have consumed can be redirected over to the active cores, allowing them to run at higher speeds.
The quad-core mode of Turbo Boost is a little more subtle; it works when the four cores aren't running a worst-case workload--for example, integer-heavy processing, since it's generally floating-point calculations that consume the most power--so they aren't bumping into the TDP limit. Turbo Boost can increase the frequency of all four cores until they're running as fast as they can for the current workload.
Eden said that the Turbo Boost controller samples the current power consumption and chip temperature 200 times per second and makes whatever adjustments are necessary. Of course, if Windows isn't asking for more performance, Turbo Boost doesn't deliver it.
In the ideal case, where just one core is running, Turbo Boost can increase the clock rate on that core from the chip's rated speed of 2GHz to 3.2GHz--that's like getting a chip eight speed grades faster than what you paid for. (Speed grades, or "bins" in the parlance of semiconductor manufacturing, usually go up in steps of around 10 percent to 20 percent. The Core 2 Mobile processor P series parts have speeds of 2.26, 2.4, 2.53, 2.66, and 2.8GHz. The T series extends this range to 2.93 and 3.06GHz, so by this measurement, 3.2GHz would be about eight steps above 2GHz.)
That's how Intel wants everyone to think of Turbo Boost, but it isn't really the natural way. To explain why, I'll have to digress briefly and describe how chips are designed and built.
The new "Clarksfield" Core i7 Mobile processors introduced at the Intel Developer Forum last week are certainly very impressive. They're huge high-performance quad-core chips with Hyper-Threading, support for two channels of DDR3-1333 DRAM, and an on-die PCI Express controller for the fastest possible connection to discrete graphics chips.