Linux 4.10 Is Landing Intel Turbo Boost Max 3.0 (TBM3)

The scheduler area work is another one of Ingo Molnar's interesting pull requests submitted already for Linux 4.10. Exciting us the most about the scheduler changes for this next kernel version is finally having mainline support for Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0.

For months we have been following the patches for Turbo Boost Max 3.0 on Linux following Intel's Broadwell-E CPU release. At first Intel PR said there would be no TBM3 on Linux but the patches ended up coming and now the support is finally there for Linux 4.10.

The scheduler changes for Linux 4.10 have the TBM3 enablement work as well as introducing the concept of "better cores" to the scheduler to prefer the scheduling of single-threaded workloads on these superior cores. Turbo Boost Max 3.0 delivers 15% better single-threaded performance, at least according to Intel on Windows, and is about boosting the performance for single-threaded workloads by moving them to the fastest core at a higher frequency. We will be seeing TBM3 on more Intel CPUs moving forward.

More details on the 4.10 scheduler changes overall via this pull request.