FordGT90Concept And what's the nominal clock? 2.4 GHz? Boost is mostly marketing fluff...especially in low power environments where power and/or heat will forbid it 99% of the time. They fact they're unwilling to reveal the nominal clock speed is quite telling...they're embarrassed by it.

This. I have a 8550u in my HP Spectre for work and I can tell you that this is probably the most accurate statement I've seen in this thread so far. Let me tell you something about this CPU, which really isn't a bad CPU, but when it boosts up to 4Ghz is what you should be aware of. I typically don't see 4Ghz on this CPU unless the CPU temperature is on the lower side. 3.8Ghz is normal. If I load two cores, it's closer to 3Ghz. With all 4 cores loaded, it's more like 2.0-2.3Ghz and that's with the upper-bound of the configurable TDP of 25 watts.With that said, it's not a bad CPU. It actually performs quite well for my use case (with writing software, some of which is multi-threaded.) It's just that it almost never runs at full boost., if you can keep the CPU cooled, it will do 3.0-3.6 on all 4 cores for very short durations, but once a steady state temperature is reach, you'll be seeing <=2.3Ghz again.I'll give Intel this, boost on this laptop is quite frugal. If it has an opportunity to clock up because of less multi-core load or lower temperatures, it will take advantage of it rather quickly. To put this in perspective, a piece of software I work on will run tests on both my tower and this laptop in about the same amount of time and it's not I/O bound and is primarily single-threaded.