Overclocking the AMD Spider

An anonymous reader writes "AMD has released two videos that show an overview of the new AMD Spider platform and how easy it is to overclock it with a single tool. The AMD Spider is based on AMD Phenom processors, the newly released ATI Radeon HD 3800 series discrete graphics and AMD 7-Series chipsets."

Comments

Re:Overclocking an AMD?

[l_bratch]

Does he even show any overclocking?

Maybe it was a problem my end, but he just talked about this mythical tool for a while, then just as you really start to get into it - the video ends.

Why overclock when you can undervolt?

[twfry]

I really don't see where the need to overclock comes from anymore. Today's speeds are pretty darn fast and I'd assume that if you actually have a real need for more processing power, that you should be able to come up with the couple hundred bucks for another socket/proc.

Lately I've been undervolting to build silent systems. The latest AMD Brisbane processors at 2.1GHz can be undervolted to 1.05V and still pass my stress tests at speed, and stay below 40C with the 'silent' fan modes.

Re:Why overclock when you can undervolt?

[bigstrat2003]

Everyone wants different stuff. I have less than no interest in a quiet (let alone silent) system, but I am interested in a fast system. I never have been an overclocker, but I can easily understand those who are... it's about squeezing every last drop of performance out of that chip. No different from wanting a silent system, really, as in both cases you're in a relative minority who's taking a concept to its extreme, they're just in different areas.

Re:Why overclock when you can undervolt?

[ceeam]

Why not? Moderately overclocked CPUs generally don't consume much more power (they're still on idle usually, and when they are not they finish their tasks _faster_), they are not louder, they are not less reliable even. Usually overclocking these days is just reversing "market positioning" and restoring proper, designed CPU speed. And if you ever do video encoding or play CPU-bound sims you can never have enough.

But I like silent systems too. But overclocked ones could be silent as well. The days of PIV and early Athlons are long gone thankfully and modern CPUs are pretty energy-efficient again.

Re:Why overclock when you can undervolt?

[Jartan]

I really don't see where the need to overclock comes from anymore.

You seem to be looking at it from a non gaming perspective. Considering the article is about a gaming system that seems to be a bit off topic as far as viewpoints go.

Re:Why overclock when you can undervolt?

[tlhIngan]

Has AMD always been OC friendly? I remember when Intel was actively discouraging the practice so as not to have sales of more expensive CPUs undercut.

Well, traditionally, AMD always had supply issues, so their chips tended to not be very overclockable (they had problems with yields of higher-end chips, so there were no high-end parts to remark as lower end chips). However, they were easy to overclock, usually with aid of conductive ink to restore bridges that set the clock frequencies and multipliers of the clock generator. You could get some nice overclocks, but they tended to be quite rare.

Intel, which usually doesn't have production or supply issues, often had problems suppling low-end chips because their chips could always perform much faster, which is why they always discouraged it. Often times, a part was marked slower just to meet market demand, but was very well capable of going faster (or... much faster). Of course, from time to time, they also had a part that was only going to perform as binned, so it didn't always work, but with Intel, the chances of that were very, very small. (The single exception I can think of was the ill-fated 1.13GHz Pentium III Tualatin CPU - basically it was a 1GHz or so overclocked, but it turns out it was overclocked as a marketing effort for it ran hot, needed lots of power, and was still unstable. I believe Intel was just stretching a design that never could go much beyond 1GHz...)

Annoyingly for Intel, everytime they introduced a new process, the low-end chips would often be wildly overclockable as their yields were such that low-end parts were of low yield as all the parts could perform much faster. Easily 10%, but 20+% overclocks were possible as well.

Full Video on Youtube

[florescent_beige]

Here.

Re:Full Video on Youtube

[florescent_beige]

In the demo, the presenter overclocks a Phenom 9500 (2.2 GHz) to 3 GHz.

Choo! Choo! All aboard!

[skoaldipper]

The marketing train...

I felt like I just got ran over. Nice job AMD. Actually, the first flashvert was pretty slick with the transformer, and was fairly informative. Honestly, I didn't quite extract much information from the overclocking one, except for it's awailable date.

Forgive me, but it's early Saturday morning here. And in the spirit of todays morning cartoon ritual, while munching on some Lucky charms cereal I fully expected the overclocking advert to finish with...

"Shh! Be vewy vewy qwiet, I'm on my AMD hunting for more raw bits! Eh. Heh! Heh! Heh! Heh!"

DISCRETE

[Sockatume]

Discrete = distinct, seperate. Discreet = subtle, low-key. That is all.

Re:DISCRETE

[Dr. Cody]

(to) dis Crete = to insult a Greek isle

What's new?

[mollymoo]

Perhaps I'm missing something, but this is noting new at all, is it? I mean, the only "innovation" here is that one company is making the CPU, chipset and graphics card. You know, like Intel have been for years. But AMD make one where the graphics card is targeted at gamers. Whoop-de-fucking-do.

Re:What's new?

[drinkypoo]

That IS new, and it IS a big deal. It is a sign! It's a sign that there's enough consumers who want their games to just fucking work on PC without having to worry about what hardware they're going to buy, like a console. Sure, you don't get all the benefits of console gaming, but you don't get all the drawbacks, either. So now AMD is interested in catering to this market - it means that the market [probably] exists, which indicates that the overall gaming market is growing. That's not news to most of us, but it's still a positive sign of the direction in which the market is heading. Personally, I am more interested in integrated systems today because I am no longer chasing the latest and greatest, I just want something cheap that works. My primary system is now a laptop (albeit the most powerful one that was available at the time I purchased it) and I like it that way. I am down to one desktop system and I have drive sleds for it so it can be a variety of testing systems. Everything else is a laptop or some other SFF unit (like my iopener, or my xbox.)

Re:What's new?

[moosesocks]

I mean, the only "innovation" here is that one company is making the CPU, chipset and graphics card. You know, like Intel have been for years. But AMD make one where the graphics card is targeted at gamers. Whoop-de-fucking-do.

Not quite. The role of the GPU is stepping up to be much more important than "just games".

Newer operating systems rely extensively on the GPU to render the desktop, apply various effects to it, etc.... These tasks can be as simple as alpha blending, or as complex as providing a hardware-accelerated version of Photoshop.

It's not quite there yet on Windows (Vista implements it rather poorly), but Linux and OS X have been using OpenGL acceleration on the desktop for quite some time now. In what might be a first for a 'desktop' feature, support for it on Linux is actually quite good, and provides a rather nice UI experience (once you turn all of Compiz's superfluous effects off, that is).

I'm going to jump in here as a part-time Apple fanboy, and also point out that Apple's very heavily pushing its set of accelerated 2D Graphics libraries toward developers to integrate into their applications to provide a more natural and fluid experience. In 10.5, OpenGL rendering is pervasive in almost every part of the user interface. Once you've got that framework in place, it becomes very easy to do all sorts of fun stuff without worrying about bogging down the CPU.

Even fast modern CPUs perform miserably when it comes to graphics operations, as they're not designed to cope with vector and matrix operations. With high-resolution displays becoming prevalent these days, it makes a good deal of sense to offload as much of the processing as possible to the GPU. If you implement this properly in the operating system, it's even transparent to the users AND developers. It's very much a no-brainer.

Many GPUs these days also provide accelerated support for video encoding/decoding, which is also a rather strenuous task for a normal desktop CPU to handle efficiently. Video editing applications can also take advantage by providing realtime previews of HD video rendered with effects applied to it.

Anyone who's done a substantial amount of video editing knows just how welcome this would be. Ironically, it's a shift back to an older paradigm, as the Amiga Video Toasters included an array of specialized graphics hardware to do all of the dirty work, and did it in real-time.

This might also translate into some sort of energy savings, given that modern CPUs consume very little power when idle, although this is pure speculation on my part.

There are all sorts of fun applications for this sort of technology once the frameworks are in place. Read up on Apple's 'Core' set of libraries for a fascinating peek into the future of UI and software design. Pixelmator is one of the first applications to take extensive advantage of these features, and is an absolute joy to work with. Although its featureset isn't as extensive as Photoshop, it's damn impressive for a 1.0 product, and I'd daresay that it's a hell of a lot more useful to mainstream audiences than the GIMP is, and has a sexy UI to boot. Dragging the sliders when tweaking a filter, and watching the ENTIRE image smoothly change as you drag the slider seems like nirvana to photographers and graphic artists (even on somewhat old hardware)

So yes. This is a big deal. Everyday desktop software is transitioning toward relying upon the GPU for basic tasks, and AMD has stepped up to the plate to provide a decent set of entry-level graphics hardware to fill in the gap. Remember the state of video hardware before nVidia came along, and introduced the TNT2 and later the Geforce2-MX? Before them, decent 3d graphics hardware was an extravagant luxury. Afterward, it was easily affordable, and nearly ubiquitous.

I should also point out that Intel's graphics hardware is absolute shit. That comparison's just not fair.

I don't see the value

[bl8n8r]

Sucking up mass jigawatts of power off the grid to juice 4 video cards for gaming is insane. The target groups for this rig are people with compensation problems or ones with no concept or care for energy conservation. We're moving in the wrong direction folks.

Re:I don't see the value

[slyn]

I don't think its a problem you'll need to worry about anytime soon. According to this, only 0.41% of about 165000 Steam users (when I just checked) have 2 GPU's. The number is probably way smaller for 3 card users, and probably barely anyone has a 4 card setup. The performance just doesn't scale well enough in SLI/Crossfire for it to be worth it to buy two GPU's. IIRC the performance increase in framerate is only around 30% if you are using two of the same model of GPU. It's just not cost effective enough for the masses to want to spend on these.

Re:I don't see the value

[Wrath0fb0b]

Sitting at home with any amount of computing power has to be more energy efficient than taking a car anywhere.

Re:I don't see the value

[/dev/trash]

Dude. Have some fun in your short short life.

I think this counts as insightful

[Kupfernigk]

In order to get to and from the office in a small European city car, with about the same real world consumption as a Prius, I use enough fuel to produce about 6KWH of electricity, enough to run a 4-GPU 2-screen rig for a morning (including the monitors). That is on the very low side for commutes; the guy who commutes from the next large city in his SUV uses as much fuel in a day as I do in two weeks. If one of the ultimate goals of these systems is virtual working in a photo realistic environment, they could be big enough to need a substantial water cooling system and still reduce global warming.

Re:4 GPUs!!! = Loud, Hot, Expensive

[TeknoHog]

I can't imagine the cinematic quality of watching a movie with 4!! GPUs

That's a lot of GPUs. 4 factorial factorial is about a mole.

Re:Just release it already

[Torvaun]

The chip can catch the bugs itself. It is a Spider, after all.