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Comment by icegreentea2 | Hacker News Reader

Base frequency isn't the same as lowest frequency (ya... it's weird). Base frequency is vaguely related to the idea that if you had all cores running at the base frequency, you would run just about at the system's TDP (it's really a complete mess, this is a simplification). Your system can still drop CPU cores down to 400-800MHz in low energy states.

What this announcement is basically saying is that Intel now has a 8 core chip where all 8 cores can run at 5GHz indefinitely "out of the box".

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According to siliconlottery.com 38% of 9900K are overclockable to 5 GHz. Probably they just decided to select good chips from 9900K at factory, those not exactly new chips.

That's mentioned in the article: "The new Core i9-9900KS uses the same silicon currently in the i9-9900K, but selectively binned in order to achieve 5.0 GHz on every core, all of the time."

Not indefinitely just at the same time because thermal throttling will happen after sometime. It just means all cores will be able to go to 5Ghz at the same time nothing about all being able to stay at 5Ghz

Did they say that? Because there are people overclocking current chips and with good cooling have no trouble staying at 5ghz on all cores without throttling.

Since it's turbo, I thought it means "as long as the CPU likes it", rather than indefinitely. Or did they change how turbo works and now it's "it will run on turbo frequencies as long as there is enough load and the CPU is not temperature throttled"?

See the original comments under the news article.

> Base frequency is when the Tau moving window time has expired. How most modern high end motherboards set it to an effective unlimited time.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13544/why-intel-processors-dr...

> To simplify, there are three main numbers to be aware of. Intel calls these numbers PL1 (power level 1), PL2 (power level 2), and T (or tau).

> PL1 is the effective long-term expected steady state power consumption of a processor. [...] PL2 is the short-term maximum power draw for a processor. [...] Tau is a timing variable. It dictates how long a processor should stay in PL2 mode before hitting a PL1 mode.

> This is where it gets really stupid: the motherboard vendors got involved, because PL1, PL2 and Tau are configurable in firmware. [...] This lets them set PL2 to 4096W and Tau to something very large, such as 65535, or -1 (infinity, depending on the BIOS setup). This means the CPU will run in its turbo modes all day and all week, just as long as it doesn’t hit thermal limits.

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