Benchmarking and overclocking Intel Nehalem processors will be tricky, but Francois Piednoel claims we will see a “dramatic” increase in speed. The trickiest benchmark of them all will be the “Turbo Mode”, the processor will be aware of the environment it is in, and will change the clock speed according to temperature and current.

Turbo mode will dynamically alter the speeds of the four cores once the processor gets out of a thermal envelope. Dunford and Piednoel told reporters that the BIOS menus will have a menu to select thermal dissipation (TDP) numbers. If you have a really good heatsink, you could crank this number to 190 watts. Conversely, an average heatsink would warrant a rating of 140 watts or below. Once the processor detects that it’s going out of this envelope, it will start clocking itself up/down. The processor will also try to move poorly threaded applications to few cores.