Cpu Speed Increasing Over Time??

[reiboul]

Hello all and first of all, merry christmas

I'd like to talk about something I noticed this evening, playing the new GP2X' tech demo (and awesome game!) Descent

When I first started to overclock my GP2X, which i own for about 6 month now, i could only get up to 270 stable, 271 or 272 for a while, and 273 kept crashing within 10 seconds!

(I was first afraid of overclocking my GP2X, since I already damaged my beloved Athlon 1Ghz a few years ago )

Now I just wanted to try Descent @ 275Mhz, dont ask me why and I noticed the game was actually STABLE! I first thought about a bug in the game, but then I tried with Picodrive, 275Mhz, one core, and played Sonic 3 for a while! then Payback (which crashed after about 5-10mn) and I'm now running the Battery test for about 6mn, and it still haven't crashed!

What is your opinion? does anyone experienced the same issue? Can a processor get 'used' to running at a high clockspeed?

What about people that practice cpu-burning? I mean, using specially designed heavy processor-using apps, in order to push the processor to its limits, while overclocked?

Thanks for reading my post



(it's been 10mn now and Battery test still hasn't crashed @ 275Mhz)


*edit* whoops, talked too fast : crashed at 9:59, probably because of card writing (which I set every 10mn)

*re-edit* : Quake crashed within about a minute or so, but still it's better than before

 

[sam fisher]

It's just coincidence, maybe you have better batteries at the moment and they are squeezing out more current, maybe the temperature has changed and has caused miniscule change in overclocking ability.

 

[reiboul]

It's just coincidence, maybe you have better batteries at the moment and they are squeezing out more current, maybe the temperature has changed and has caused miniscule change in overclocking ability.

I always use AC adapter when overclocking that high, and hadn't changed my battery set

but OK for the temperature, as summer was unfortunately much hotter than winter in my bedroom

Now the question : who will be the first to water-cool his GP2X??

 

[sam fisher]

Wouldn't make more than 1mhz difference, at most.

From a physics standpoint, heating something up gives its atoms more kinetic energy, meaning the vibrate, or oscillate, more, this means that the atoms push each other apart more with collisions, hence the physical size of object increases as it is heated up.

In a Silicon Semi-Conductor based CPU, it operates by switching transistors between an On, 1, and Off, 0, state. Hence why computers count in binary using bits in bytes etc.

In desktop PC's, and laptops, the processors generate a huge amount of heat, that is why proper cooling is essential, if the transistors become to hot, they can change state to slowly, causing errors and becoming unstable. Or they can eventually lose the ability to change state at all, and will probably have combusted by then, anyway. Or they can become physically to large, and due to the small size of transistors in nm or billionths of a meter, they may short circuit due to their increases size, and cause crashes and or erros. Either way, they become unstable.

The GP2x ARM9 processors generate very little heat themselves, so heating isn't an issue. What causes the instability is the fact that the transistors in the GP2x's processors cannot switch state at a speed fast enough for the increases clockrate, and hence, instability occurs.

I am sorry if this contains errors but it is 4am here.

 

[nubie]

Hello all and first of all, merry christmas

I'd like to talk about something I noticed this evening, playing the new GP2X' tech demo (and awesome game!) Descent

When I first started to overclock my GP2X, which i own for about 6 month now, i could only get up to 270 stable, 271 or 272 for a while, and 273 kept crashing within 10 seconds!

(I was first afraid of overclocking my GP2X, since I already damaged my beloved Athlon 1Ghz a few years ago )

Mine never got more stable, and it would only do 240 stable, pretty bad.

Out of curiosity, how did you manage to hurt an Athlon 1Ghz? I have clocked just about every AMD (and other) proc I ever owned and they love it. My Duron 800 would easily do 900mhz, can't remember at what voltage. (I am running a $100 Athlon64 4000+ @ 3Ghz for 2-3 weeks so far, no problems, barely topped 108F full load on a oem tiny all aluminium HS/Fan, still swapped for a Zalman 7000B for peace of mind).

As far as the temps go, the ARM cores aren't plagued by heat issues, they shouldn't get more than warm.

 

[sehs33]

Out of curiosity, how did you manage to hurt an Athlon 1Ghz?

I guess he had a cooling problem, a friend of mine had lost several AMD CPUs in earlier years because of silly things like cpu fan collecting some dust or sotp working for few seconds, I know most of the people here have seen this already, but this is what happens once you remove the CPU coolers off AMD processors (am not an intel fan boy, but AMD CPUs have real trouble with heat):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgOmMAasqto

 

[reiboul]

I was still a newb (err... I mean, more than now ) and tried to push my athlon (tbird 1ghz) to 1,33Ghz (step by step)
It was quite stable @ 1,3, yet quite hot, but eventually, my power supply fried, an I was very afraid because I thought it was the processor! I had not enough hardware to test each component, so had to give it back to my retailer, and had to wait for a week before knowing the results...
Quite weird, the CPU was physically damaged to the core (probably due to many radiator mount/dismount), but still worked, until the day it finally crached forever RIP, beloved Athlon... You were still young!

Some kind of childhood traumatism, you know? :unsure:



To stay off-topic : If arm are so cool, why aren't they used in PC? I know they have reduced instruction set, but they have more registers to play with I think Debian have ARM-compiled packages, is it possible to have a computer based on ARM processor and Debian OS, including most of the important programs for usual everyday tasks? Or do you have to be a leet geek, and recompile every software?

 

[sand_man]

i could be wrong here, but i think that if your psu fried, it would be unrelated to overclocking your cpu\


[edit]
or maybe i misread your post altogether...

 

[rokdcasbah]

To stay off-topic : If arm are so cool, why aren't they used in PC? I know they have reduced instruction set, but they have more registers to play with I think Debian have ARM-compiled packages, is it possible to have a computer based on ARM processor and Debian OS, including most of the important programs for usual everyday tasks? Or do you have to be a leet geek, and recompile every software?

They are, they're just not mainstream at all. And you're right about linux-arm, although I don't know if there's a pre-compiled distro out there that meets a lot of people's needs. But back in the day, an OS called "Arthur" was designed for the Acorn Archimedes. Now Arthur has become RISC OS 6, while Acorn has become ARM Ltd. ( http://www.riscos.com/ )

If you specify RISC rather than just ARM, you get more options. Things like SPARC, XScale...
typically high-end workstations with RISC chips. PowerPC was RISC but Apple has just now switched over to Intel Core, removing what was a little bit of variety in the marketplace.

x86 is by far the dominant platform for desktop computers for a variety of reasons. I'm sure a lot of those reasons have to do with the history of the market. But as far as hardware advantages: parallel instructions for 3d/multimedia (3dnow, mmx), built-in FPU. Fast clock speeds. Being able to run Windows.

I may be wrong about Windows being x86-exclusive...

 

[reiboul]

i could be wrong here, but i think that if your psu fried, it would be unrelated to overclocking your cpu\


[edit]
or maybe i misread your post altogether...

Even if it had nothing to do with overclocking, from that day I stopped overclocking
... except my GP2X

 

[reiboul]

To stay off-topic : If arm are so cool, why aren't they used in PC? I know they have reduced instruction set, but they have more registers to play with I think Debian have ARM-compiled packages, is it possible to have a computer based on ARM processor and Debian OS, including most of the important programs for usual everyday tasks? Or do you have to be a leet geek, and recompile every software?

They are, they're just not mainstream at all. And you're right about linux-arm, although I don't know if there's a pre-compiled distro out there that meets a lot of people's needs. But back in the day, an OS called "Arthur" was designed for the Acorn Archimedes. Now Arthur has become RISC OS 6, while Acorn has become ARM Ltd. ( http://www.riscos.com/ )

If you specify RISC rather than just ARM, you get more options. Things like SPARC, XScale...
typically high-end workstations with RISC chips. PowerPC was RISC but Apple has just now switched over to Intel Core, removing what was a little bit of variety in the marketplace.

x86 is by far the dominant platform for desktop computers for a variety of reasons. I'm sure a lot of those reasons have to do with the history of the market. But as far as hardware advantages: parallel instructions for 3d/multimedia (3dnow, mmx), built-in FPU. Fast clock speeds. Being able to run Windows.

I may be wrong about Windows being x86-exclusive...

damn microsoft-intel lobby :angry: