AMD Athlon64 4000+ Underclocking

Bios_Hakr writes "PC Stats is running an article on their experiences underclocking an AMD 4000+ processor. Their goal was to try and reduce the voltage requirements and lower the heat output. They benchmark using 3dMark01, 3dMark05, as well as SuperPi. From the article: 'This got us thinking though; what about under-clocking? Most modern processors and motherboards can just as easily run under a rated speed as it can run over... but is there a point to this? Well possibly.'"

Comments

Re:Umm....

[Xshare]

I think the point is that these "better" processors were built with that larger processor speed in mind, and if you underclock it, you still get the added benefit of somethign that's supposed to cool and use a bigger processor for a smaller one. It's like... AMD when they build the 4000+ over the 3200+, attempt to make the 4000+ as calm and quiet as possible, within limits, and go farther with the 4000+ than with the 3200+. Now if you underclock the 4000+, you still take advantage of that extra technology...

I'm probably wrong.

Re:Don't keep us in suspense

[pla]

it draws a whopping 54 watts average

Oops... Just to clarify, the entire system, including power supply losses, draws that much. The CPU itself, from what I've read (published numbers seem to vary a LOT, and I'd love to see some hard data on the min, mean, and max draw of the 90nm Athlon 64s), only eats between 7 and 35W (for comparison, the Pentium III line came in at the low 30s) with a theoretical max somewhere in the 60W range.


Kinda funny, actually... When everyone talks about needing bigger and better power supplies, with 400W considered a bare minimum and 600W not all that uncommon these days, I upgraded from an old P-III system and the total power consumption of the system dropped by half.

I already did this back in 1980.....

[panurge]

Any other older-timers may remember the already very slow RCA 1802 CMOS processor. I used one of these in a home-made portable EPROM programmer, which allowed you to enter data from a keypad to make tiny patches to tiny machine code programs. To increase battery life, the thing was clocked using a 2MHz crystal (enough for the eprom programming) but when it wasn't burning, it ran on a 20KHz clock which was enough for the keypad data entry. The result was a power consumption in the low hundreds of microamps when idle, rather than 10mA or so. To those who say, why not just turn it off? I have to explain that in those days flash memory came in units of 64 expensive bytes. The battery power was necessary to keep the CMOS static RAM alive.

Thank you for letting me share this old-timer drivelling on slashdot.