Am I the only one who shuddered at the return of the "turbo" button?

I keep seeing the ads for the Intel (r) Core (c) i(tm)7(tm) (sorry to any lawyers if I messed up the r's and c's there) processors with the "turbo boost" feature.

Did you know my IBM PC XT clone had this too?

Does anyone at Intel remember why few 286 and even fewer 386 boards (PC Chips 386SX boards excepted) even bothered still including pins for the "turbo button"? (Yes, I know it's something you click on on your task bar these days - after all, we all need some more mouse-induced inefficiency)

Because everyone left them pressed. All the time.

Look - the rest of the hardware still consumes the same amount of power, so there is no reason whatsoever to wait longer (and let your equipment run longer, burning more electricity) for any given task to finish.

Lastly, your Core i7 processor, sold to you at 2.8 GHz, is actually a 3.47 GHz processor when it's "turbo boosted." So which one did you pay for? I suspect, the 3.47 GHz part. Why not just call it that, and have the processor scale back its CPU speed to save power like all the other modern processors do?

You guys are killing me!