Slashdot Mirror
Intel's Anti-Overclocking Technology Simplified
John Thorensen writes "Found a fantastic article on Intel's recent Anti-Overclocking patent at Fastsilicon.com. Worth the read, as it also explains some of the technical and ethical issues of overclocking. Good to see that some tech journalists can still write material understandable by an average person."
This article is a fabrication. The technology remains complicated as ever. Victory by our glorious forces over the AMD infidels is imminent.
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Beware - soon we will find people who sell overclocking devices going to jail for violating DMCA.
(yes, I forgot my password here.. again lol)
-Honestman
Article came up fine for me. Maybe you need to overclock your monitor.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
Error 502
;)
Remote server down or not responding.
Looks like Fastsilicon.com isn't that fast
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
Now if they could incorporate and Anti-AMD-processor -that-is-faster-for-less-money technology, they'd be all set!
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
1. Detect servers with overclocked processors 2. Post link to slashdot 3. Processor is fried :)
Seriously, wtf? Ethics should be something applied to lawyers, doctors, mechanics, etc.. not something that should be brought up when a kid (or adult i guess) is tweeking his hardware. The fact that overclocking voids any warranty should be enough of a precaution by manufacturers.
they're trying to keep power-users from overclocking, justifying it by the fact that some "evil systems builders" buy cheaper processors and overclock them, selling them to YOUR mom unknowingly, who then calls you at 2am when her computer catches on fire from all the heat.
Son! I was just playing online scrabble and chatting on AOL when my computer started to melt! Did I break the internet???
--Less Thinkin', More Drinkin'...
What ethical issues are there relating to overclocking? Overclocking a chip, and selling it at a higher speed is already called "fraud". There's nothing ethical or unethical about overclocking. Is redlining your car's engine unethical? Stupid maybe, but that's about it...
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Personally, I'd like to be able to underclock better so it would be easier to built a really quiet PC. Although there are a few articles about it, silent PCs are an underserved area of the market.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
..we discuss the ethical implications of using your teabags twice instead of once, and we explore the high-tech solutions to this problem, and the clear connection to terrorism.
I hate overclocking. Now I can't accidentally do it.
YOU RULE INTEL!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Writing material which is readable to the average tech-interested
layperson is easy. Doing that while avoiding insipidity and
simplification to the point of being misleading.... ummm....
priceless?
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
This technique is nothing more than embedding an oscillator on-chip, and using that to monitor the main clock.
Since most CPUs internally multiply their clock (you don't feed a 3.0 GHz P4 a 3.0 GHz clock, you feed it a much slower clock and it multiplies it up), why then don't manufacturer's just use an embedded clock and do away with all this?
Simple - it is very hard to have an accurate clock embedded in the CPU. External clocks can use a quartz crystal to vibrate and make the clock - an embedded oscillator would have to use an on-chip delay line or RC network, which will drift over time, temperature, and voltage.
So all they can do with a system like this is catch you if you are overclocking by a fairly large amount - were they to try to trap you at a 10% overclock they would have false trips due to process variation.
To extend the analogy the article used: you will get a speeding ticket if you are going 20 over the speed limit. Keep it less than 10 over and you will be fine.
NOTE: this is not advice condoning overclocking or speeding! This is just an analysis of the technology involved.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I think it's worth it to point out that the article stated that there are ethical issues only when a vendor sells a comptuer that is overclocked without alerting the consumer.
If this has been a problem, I agree with Intel that it's important to restrict overclocking to protect, not limit, the consumer.
If vendors are only rarely (or never) overclocking a CPU and selling it for for more then I think that while it's probably not a wise business decision by Intel to implement such a technology just to limit consumers, it is Intel's right as the manufacturer and there is nothing ethically wrong with it. There is still competition and the market will speak for itself.
No one is forcing you to buy Intel products after all.
Let's start overclocking, enhancing, and reverse engineering EVERYTHING to protest these laws.
Preventing overclocking is just corportate bs. Remember the liminal messaging of Brave New World, "I'm tired of old things. I want new things. If it's broken, don't fix it. Throw old things away."
In all honesty, people probably break as many chips as they enhance and overclocking helps profits for chip makers. Anyways, you can use this code, compared against the time/date clock to determine if a chip is overclocked. Software/electronic patents are a bunch of bullcrap for things like this because it's so damn simple to recreate the effect.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It is their property first, though, and if they want to add a mechanism to make overclocking difficult, if not impossible, then it is their right. It is your problem if you still buy it. If they came to your house and installed it on a motherboard that you already owned then you would have a complaint. Otherwise you are just a knee-jerking troll.
I don't think that the author of this article actually understands the patent in question. Specifically, the reference signal is absolutely not generated on the CPU die, as the author claims. Intel's new scheme is still dependent on the chipset's cooperation.
h tm l
Anyway, I won't go into anymore detail here, because I explain the patent and its implications for overclocking in the following Ars news post:
http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/1048630320.
Senior CPU Editor | Ars Technica | http://arstechnica.com/
I was actually thinking about building a P4 box for my next main machine and looking forward to the quiet whirr of a stock Intel heatsink. After 3 years of Delta Fans on Athys, I thought a P4 was a great idea for silence and overclocking. And what does Intel do? They bend all the OCers over and kick us squarely in the nuts.
I have an older technology that fits nicely alongside Intels anti-overclocking technology, it's proprietary and only works with geeks, OCers and effects all systems we build, its called anti-Intel-purchasing technology and I suggest we all use it religiously.
If overclocking your poor processor to its death is ethical, then so is driving your herd of sheep off a cliff, or nailing your dog's feet to the floor so you can use it as a doorstop.
And those people who post a link to slashdot without providing a mirror or cache just so they can watch some innocent, defenseless server get turned into a smoking carbon shell are no better.
You know, IC's and other silicon-die based products have rights as well.
This has been a PSA from FETS (Fanatics for the Ethical Treatment of Silicon)
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
For a while now, Asus has had the bad habit of tweaking their FSB slightly out-of-spec, for example a 135 MHz FSB instead of 133. Although only a slight overclock, this can easily lead to speed increase of 100 MHz on the (currently) high-spec processors. If Intel were to tweak their overclock-detection to such a point that it can even detect minor increases, I'll be curious what happens to Asus...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
... An over-clock deterrent mechanism of a chipset which comprises an over-clock detection circuit for detecting over-clocking of a system ... and an over-clock prevention (thwarting) circuit.
Okay, to implement this, they're including a reference clock on the chip, which means that processors of different (marketed) speeds will have to be made with a different process (which has maybe been true for a long time, but I was lead to believe that, eg in the pIII days, the wafers that failed 1Ghz just got sold as 833MHz, etc).
So instead of doing all these calculations to decide if you're "speeding," and then doing even *more* calculations to penalize you, why don't they just expose this reference clock speed in a special interrupt call? And maybe even the relation to the operating speed (eg, "you are overclocked by 10%")? Then, they could release an app that would tell you how fast your computer was SUPPOSED to be, and how fast it IS.
Then, OC'ers could have their cake, and no one else could be taken advantage of by unscrupulous OEMs who overclock to bump up their margins. I concede the point that "most average people will never check anyway," but just having the information *available* should protect Intel from liability, which seems to be the essential idea. Plus, the threat of having the practice exposed at any time should stop at least some of the overclock-resellers.
I get sick and tired of all these hardware nerdz acting like they're electrical engineers (which I happen to be). The out of a flop, thru a logic cloud and into the next flop is determined by 1) the output resistance of each logic gate, and 2) the capacitance (load) that is driven. The output resistance of a fet goes up when temperature goes up. This is why cooling your processor allows it run faster. However, there is a limit. No matter how much you cool your proc, it'll never go to 0 resistance. The amount of heat produced by your proc doesn't determine the speed bin it went into. The "fastness" of the batch of wafers that die was cut from determines the speed bin. Fet threshold voltages drift from wafer to wafer (and die to die within a wafer). Higher thresholds = slower fets. Heat is proportional to Capacitance*Voltage^2*Frequency. Note that fet resistance isn't in that equation.
If it is really meant to protect the consumer, and not to forbid overclocking all together,
they could always team up with the BIOS maker (just like for the temperature logic)
And just write a big fat: "THIS CPU IS MEANT TO RUN AT X SPEED AND IS CURRENTLY RUNNING AT Y SPEED. YOUR GARANTY MAY BE VOID..."
I'd rather be sailing...
This is Nigel, the owner of fastsilicon.com. As you probably already know, we are having some issues with our server at the moment. Thanks for your support. Now, focusing on the article... "I don't think that the author of this article actually understands the patent in question" This article was not written for the "l33t geek", but for the average "user" to understand. We have simplified many of the more technical terms. And yes, we fully understand what were talking about :)
I appreciate all your feedback.
Many may ask at this point, "If the processor does more work with higher clock speeds, why are there limitations on the clock speed - why can't one run a processor as fast as they want?". Although there are many factors that contribute to the answer to this question, the basic answer to this is heat. With every clock pulse, electricity flows through the processor. Because of resistance in the processor's pathways (think of it as a sort of electrical friction), some of this energy is converted to heat, similar to what happens when you rub your hands together very quickly. The higher the clock speed, the more often the clock pulses come, which means that more heat is generated at higher clock speeds. Because processors don't react well to the effects of this heat, testing is done to determine the maximum clock speed that they can run at safely.
That is not really accurate. While it is true that power and clock speed are approxmately linearly related (double the clock speed, double the heat output), the way the article explains the max speed is wrong. This implies that if you took a 2ghz P4 and clocked it at 2.4ghz, it would run hotter than a "real" 2.4ghz P4. This is not the case. All P4s will put out the same amount of heat at a given clock speed.
The actual reason that chips clock at different speeds has to do with precision of manufacture. I'm not really a car person, but I would imagine that better quality parts would let an engine go faster. If a spark plug has a problem, you might get misfires at higher RPMs (?). When a CPU is made, sometimes some of the wires are too thin, and because of the higher resistance it takes more time for enough charge to flow through the wire to get a 1 to change to a 0 (or vice versa). Now, you cannot clock it as fast or the CPU will produce erroneous results.
Another possible defect would be two wires ending up too close to each other. The faster a wire changes voltage, the more interference it creates in wires nearby. With the two wires closer than expected, they might start to experience "crosstalk", where the signal on one of the wires is affected by the other wire. At lower speeds, crosstalk is less of a problem.
There are many more things that cause variations in the max stable speeds of processors, but I won't go into them.
You might next ask, "What about the 'perfect' chips? Why can't they go faster?". The answer to that question is that even the best transistors can only switch so fast, and an electrical signal can only travel so far in a given period of time. When you're working with frequencies in the GHz, light can travel no more than a few feet, and the speed of electricity in wires is much lower.
The processors are then labeled with this clock speed, and they go out the door with a designation such as, "Pentium 4 - 2.4GHz". In this particular case, Intel has tested the processor and has determined that to run properly, it needs a clock that runs no faster than 2.4 billion times per second
The reason you can overclock is that Intel's tests are brutal. If they sell a processor as 2GHz and someone builds a computer with poor case ventilation and a cheap heatsink and low quality power supply in the sahara desert, the computer needs to be stable. Processors can run faster at lower temperatures (there are some equations describing the effects of temperature on various parts and generally higher temperature slows things down), so in a properly ventilated case with a good heatsink (and reliable power supply), the processor can operate reliably at higher-than-rated speeds.
It is important to note that just increasing the clock speed won't have as drastic of an effect on processor lifetime as many people say. What WILL have serious effects, though, is increasing the voltage. Why do overclockers like to raise the core voltage? More voltage means more current and stronger signals. In the thin wire scenario above, more voltage and more current means that even with the higher resistance,
My server
We will sell you one 2 Ghz processor. But it will only be activated @ 500 MHz. You want it to run faster? mmmmmm well pal, you'll have to pay us $50. How it will be activated? send us the money, we'll send you a password. Oh naughty boy!, don't try to get this password at those ugly hacker sites. The password is wired to a serial number inside the processor. What, you want 2 Ghz? sorry, the $50 I was talking about was for 1 Ghz. For 2 GHz is $80. Oh, by the way, that is just the 1 yr fee. At the end of the period your processor will go back to 500 Mhz. But don't worry, you know where to reach us! Think about it this way: we love so much to increase the speed of your CPU that we will do it regularly!! In a way, we are liberating your CPU. (I love that word, you can use it for almost anything these days). Thanks for shopping Intel!