AMD Cool 'n' Quiet, Turbo Core Impact On Linux

Smallpt was not impacted much by Turbo Core.

When running OpenSSL we finally see a big performance boost out of Turbo Core. Turbo Core had increased the OpenSSL RSA 4096-bit performance for the FX-8150 by about 14%.

OpenSSL isn't as well multi-threaded as Smallpt and C-Ray, so the clock speed for some of the cores ended up dropping down to 1800MHz with Cool 'n' Quiet.

According to the AMD hwmon driver for monitoring the CPU temperature, Turbo Core for OpenSSL resulted in a higher operating temperature by about 13°C. Cool 'n' Quiet just dropped the CPU temperature by one degree.

With Turbo Core enabled, OpenSSL was going through nearly 20 Watts more power than when the feature was disabled, albeit the signing performance was better by ~14% with this auto-overclocking feature.