Huawei's CPU Turbo: what does it do?

When Huawei announced GPU Turbo there was plenty of misunderstanding of what it does. So, now the company announced CPU Turbo with the Kirin 970-powered Honor Note 10 and there seems to be a similar confusion.

The official announcement is very vague, but here’s what we have so far – enabling CPU Turbo mode will raise the clock speeds (by an unspecified amount) and will free up RAM. Let’s break it down.

The Honor Note 10 features a cooling system dubbed “The Nine” - a heat pipe that keeps the chipset running cool. This should help it stay cool and enable the higher clock. That might increase power consumption but the phone has a 5,000mAh battery so it should still last a while.

As for freeing up RAM, it will allow games to load more assets instead of reading them from flash storage (which can cause momentary slow downs). The phone comes with 6GB of RAM as standard and there’s an 8GB version too, so it should have less RAM-related issues than most phones out there, but still.

It’s not just games, the Honor Note 10 supports Huawei’s PC mode so the extra clock speed and free RAM could come handy for some desktop-grade software. Using the dedicated hardware button, you can enable both CPU and GPU Turbo modes on the Note 10.

Given how GPU Turbo was added as a software update to Kirin 970 (and 960) phones, we expect the same to happen with CPU Turbo (we’ll have to wait for official confirmation and a schedule from Huawei, though).