More on Athlon Overclocking

The Tech Report is running an article concerning Athlon overclocking. With the 1Ghz+ chips coming down the line apparently soon, will things need to change? Or will it be just a documentation change? The other change is the issue of moving to on-die L2 cache - how will that affect things?

Comments

Oh boy

[whoop]

Boy lemme tell ya, if anyone is gonna spend the $1200 (or whatever) for a 1000 Mhz chip, and doesn't overclock it, they are downright fools. I mean, how can you look at yourself in your monitor's reflection every day with a measly 1000 Mhz machine? Sure you compile kernels in 5 seconds, but look at the guy down the road. He's running his at 1700 Mhz right now, pulling in about 738 fps in . Yeah, that's right, you non-overclockin weirdo, you.

Ladies and gentlemen. Do not let this scenario happen to you. The next time you remortgage your home to buy a CPU, remember, overclock that puppy to heck. Thank you.

This has been a paid advertisement from the Go Ahead and Fry that CPU Foundation.

Re:Why overclock?

[The Man]

You have missed the point. The objective of overclocking is not to obtain noticeable, or even measurable, speed increases in any task. It is to show how 31337 the 0v3rC10kk3r d00d!!!#!!@!!! is. You are correct, however, when you mention that A 1 GHz chip (or even a 800 MHz one) can, for most tasks, outpace any other componant of the system. This is why real workstations with "slow" 300-500MHz processors can easily outperform peecees with processors clocked twice as fast or faster. It's called balanced design, and has never made an appearance in the peecee world. The great irony is that peecee overclockers are trying to increase the speed of what is already the fastest component in their systems but refuse to spend one extra currency unit on improving the subsystems that are the slowest in the computing world. Instead, they should buy a chip 200-300 MHz behind the state of the "art" and spend the extra dosh on a better mainboard, i/o subsystem, and disks. It's amazing how much better performance such a system can deliver at a similar price point.

rated speed to avoid single-bit errors and the like

SBEs, eh? Well, that implies that you invested in ECC memory. Investing in higher quality components is highly unusual for an overclocker. I can assure you that most of them observe SBEs as a BSOD in their GameOS, because they spent all their cash on a higher-clocked processor and then bought Joe's Factory Thirds "PC92-1/2" Memory from the guy on the corner wearing a trench coat.

Re:ick..

[JamesKPolk]

Which is better?

Compile, test, debug
Compile, test, debug

OR

Compile, check email, test, debug
Compile, have lunch, test, debug

?

On-Die Cache

[Datafage]

The move to on-die cache is what has me most interested. High-speed cache is what affects gaming most, not the actual size of the cache, and as we all know, gaming is what counts.:) For repetitive tasks, such as searching a database, a larger L2 cache is superior. For non-repetitive tasks, like drawing triangles, the faster cache will win out. Of course, if you can get both, like the Xeon or alleged Athlons with 8 Meg full-speed cache, life is good.

Full-speed cache is the only thing letting aluminummines approach or outperform Athlons, just look at the graphs and you'll see that the P3s get closer and closer as the speed increases, and the Athlon's cache gets slower and slower by comparison. With full-speed cache, AMD will be in a very good position as far as benchmarks go. If you think the Athlon is a good performer now, just wait. :)

Am I the only one thinking we'll be seeing the BiAthlon and TriAthlon just like the P2 and P3 came along?

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think people

[ArchieBunker]

Water can boil at any RF frequency. When you radiate 1kw of power into a steel box its going to cook something. This has nothing to do with your computer. The cpu clock is running at 1Ghz, but at very minimal power, probably milliwatts. What takes so much current is the 40 million transistors on the cpu. If your athlon suddenly started radiating hundreds of watts of RF I would be worried.