Intel's Fast Throttle: Advanced Per-Core Thermal Throttling for Raptor Lake and Upcoming Arrow Lake CPUs

Intel's Fast Throttle: Advanced Per-Core Thermal Throttling for Raptor Lake and Upcoming Arrow Lake CPUs
Image credit: Intel Website 

Fast Throttle, a per-core thermal throttling solution, debuted on 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors and is among the best CPUs. It provides an alternative, more performant method of temperature-related throttling compared to TJMax. This feature uses clock modulation to control the CPU's performance and power consumption by turning the physical CPU clock on or off, offering fine-grained frequency control over the processor in thermally limited situations.

Clock modulation, unlike traditional thermal throttling mechanisms such as TJMax, doesn't manipulate the chip's operating frequency (multiplier) and voltage or alter Intel's turbo-boosting algorithm. Instead, it turns off the clock for a specific duration, which helps in keeping the CPU within its thermal limits without compromising performance drastically. The main highlight of Fast Throttle is its per-core throttling adjustments, only affecting cores that are overheating.

Initially, when Fast Throttle debuted with the 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors, Intel had locked out any customization, making the feature relatively useless. However, with the Raptor Lake Refresh, Intel exposed manual customization to users, making it particularly useful for overclockers. Although thermal throttling isn't ideal for overclocking, Intel's latest hybrid CPUs run so hot that users often need to tweak their overclocks around thermal throttling to maximize performance. Fast Throttle thus provides a method of optimizing performance under thermally constrained situations.

While Fast Throttle has not yet proven to be definitively better than all other thermal throttling mechanisms, it stands out as the only one that Intel supports for per-core thermal throttling, which can be particularly advantageous on high-core-count chips. Jaykihn has also claimed that Fast Throttle will come to Intel's upcoming Arrow Lake processors, making Arrow Lake the third-generation CPU architecture to adopt this innovative thermal throttling feature.