>>28,29
In the first Core architecture (brand name "Core 2 Duo"), RDTSC indeed scaled with frequency, as you'd expect.
However on Sandy Bridge (haven't tested on Nehalem) it seems it always runs at the chip's nominal frequency.
Some old games that used to be very broken on variable speed CPUs seem to work perfectly too. Cycle performance counters report >2 billion cycles used by a single thread in a second, even when the CPU is locked at much lower speeds.
So maybe they realized this was a compatibility problem and gave up and just turned RDTSC into a high-frequency fixed clock.
RDTSC actually is a better performance-measurement tool than time precisely because modern CPU can self-adjust their frequency.
Sort of. The CPU/memory ratio, which is significant for some workloads, will vary, and cycle counting doesn't compensate for that. Learn to use your OS, it provides interfaces to lock the CPU frequency to any given value. For turbo enabled CPUs, you can lock them to their nominal frequency (there's no need to disable it in the BIOS).