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Question about impact of overclocking...

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McTimson

Member
Joined
Dec 31, 2002
Location
Folding@Home in New York
Alright, you know how AMD CPU's do more 'work' per mhZ than Intel processors do? I was just wondering, when you overclock it, does it keep this? Does it still do more work, or does it drop? I just randomly thought about this, so I figured I'd ask...
 
Yes it still does "more work" per cycle, you are just increasing the ammount of cycle that it can do in a given ammount of time. That is why my 1700 at 2.5Ghz will out perform the 3.06Ghz P4B.
 
The amount of 'work per cycle' remains static whatever the clockspeed of the processor is. By overclocking it you have more cycles in a given time (you could think as cycles per second) meaning the computer get's more work done. Still, the diferance in clock speed will give you just as much performance increase as buying a processor at that speed from the shop.

While overclocking you often also gain in performance by raising the fsb, and through that adding to the memory bandwidth, I've noticed that my computer can be alot more responsive at 2.15ghz with 220mhz fsb then at 2.3ghz with 200mhz fsb. (did'nt run any benchmarks though)
 
Hmmm....I thought so...but if that's true, why doesn't AMD overclock their chips, and sell them as actual 2.5 Ghz chips? I mean, they could even stick a warning on it, saying that it will need excessive cooling or whatever, but that would give the chip an even higher PR rating, which would get them more money. I'm sure people wouldn't mind having better heatsinks (most do anyway), and they get a processor that kicks the crap out of any P4.
 
because a) 2.5ghz is not garunteed and b) you have to push the voltage out of spec to do it. Amd arnt going to sell any 2.5ghz cpu's for a while yet.
 
There is also the question of how far a manufacturer should go to achieve the speed of a processor. When amd first released the xp2800 it was running on the t-bred B core. Yields where very low, and they have to do alot of handpicking to find the best specimins. While it was important for them to have a processor of this speed on the market, it might not be financially viable. Above this, they can't count on all custermers having adequate cooling on the processor and for the case. This means they have to leave headroom in the performance. (slk-800's, good airflow ect.)

Amd will release what they have to release to keep up with the competition, but they don't have any point in releasing a model that intel can compete with, and that they will have dificulty producing.
 
actually i disagree with the fact that it does the "same" work per hz when you overclock unless all you did ws change the multiplier to a higher one then that is true but usually people change the multiplier and the bus speed once the bus speed goes off your going to get mor per mhz because the memory bus is going to be more efficient being able to zip more info more instructions etc etc around
 
When AMD or Intel marks the speeds they will simply check at what speed the CPUs runs stable at stock voltage and also where it within a reasonable temperature range. Then after that they also lower it by a couple of MHz to be 100% sure that it'll work.

This is why we have overclocking, because we can yield better results with better cooling and more voltage.
 
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