Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 identifies the “favored cores” in your multi-core CPU and allows higher turbo boost for those cores.
While Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 carries a similar name, it’s not exactly the same as Turbo Boost 2.0. The latter focuses explicitly on exploiting the available power budget to provide additional computing performance. On the other hand, Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 aims to use the natural variance in CPU core quality observed in multi-core CPUs. With ITBMT3, Intel identifies the best cores in your CPU and calls those the favored cores.
The favored cores are essential for two reasons.
- Intel allows for additional frequency boosts of the favored cores. For example, on the 13700K, there are two favored P-cores and no favored E-cores. Both favored P-cores can boost to 5.4 GHz, while the other 6 P-cores can only boost up to 5.3 GHz. Note that the 5.4 GHz is restricted to only scenarios where 2 core is active.
- Second, the operating system will automatically assign the most demanding workloads to these favored cores, ensuring potentially higher performance.
The performance benefit of ITBMT 3.0 is most visible in low thread count workloads. Highly threaded workloads do not benefit from ITBMT 3.0.