What is "overclocking?"

October 23, 2005 10:34 AM

What is "Overclocking" in programmers term?

I'm reading in an essay: “Overclocking,” the term programmers use to describe supercharging a computer’s brain capacity by weakening it." Could somebody explain this in laymen terms?

posted by semmi to Technology (15 answers total)

A computer executes single instructions on a very fast clock cycle. Modern computers execute one instruction once every half nanosecond or so. You overclock by taking the speed set at the factory and speeding it up a bit.

The only reason that generally isn't done is that you can overheat the computer by doing that.
posted by maschnitz at 10:39 AM on October 23, 2005

Programmers don't overclock, generally. It's more the realm of tweakers/tinkerers that enjoy building their own computers and gamers that try to get that last bit of performance. Overclocking has become a hobby in itself. The Wikipedia overclocking article is a good starting point, but it may be a bit too technical.
posted by zsazsa at 10:47 AM on October 23, 2005

it's making the internal clock of the computer run fast, so that the computer does more work per minute.
posted by andrew cooke at 10:51 AM on October 23, 2005

Best answer: I assume (via google) that it's this article. I don't know where the writer got that bizarre idea from. Overclocking is a hardware hack - you're making a computer chip run above its normal speed. An overclocked computer is at risk of crashing or overheating, but that's the result of overclocking, not the cause of it.

If you read Cochran's Overclocking Essay, he uses the analogy correctly.
posted by O9scar at 11:01 AM on October 23, 2005

Computer processors do work based on the ticking of a clock (which ticks a billion times a second for each gigahertz). That clock can only run so fast before the chip becomes unreliable. Overclocking means adjusting the rate at which ones own computer runs to see if it will run slightly faster without crashing. Often this requires beefing up the computer cooling system.

At the factory, they test a chip from each batch to see how fast it will run reliably, and usually the whole batch is sold at that speed. This means certains chips may run better then the one that was tested. Manufacturers also sell chips that work perfectly well at, say, 800MHz as "700MHz" chips, in order to hit a pricepoint. An overclocker will buy that chip and fiddle with the settings to make it run at 800MHz.
posted by cillit bang at 11:08 AM on October 23, 2005

The people who've posted have mostly gotten it right, but I thought I'd throw in my 2¢

First of all, over-clocking has nothing to do with programming. Nothing at all. In fact, programming usually doesn't even require a fast computer. I'm a professional programmer, and my main computer is a 600mhz PC.

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Think of each generation and each marketing label for every chip that you know of, like "Pentium" or "Athlon" inside of those marketing classifications, there will be several revisions. Like "coppermine" or "Thunderbird". Those revisions are all made from the exact same template. So you can think of each chip as a Xerox copy of an ideal, perfect chip. Each one will have different flaws, and those flaws have different effects. Some of those chips will be able to run at a certain speed (say, 800mhz) and other ones will not, but will be able to run at 700mhz.

So, a 700mhz chip costs the same amount of money as an 800mhz chip. but how many chips go into each category is controlled by demand side curves, not supply curves. Some 800 mhz chips may get sold as 700mhz chips as demand demands.

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In addition to this, CPU manufacturers will sell chips well below their maximum speed. They'll sell the chip at the fastest speed that chip can run reliably so a home computer enthusiast might be willing to sacrifice some stability in order to get a better speed. So a chip that can run for years at 800mhz might crash occasionally at 900mhz, but you'll get a better frame rate in quake.

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The analogy to brains is rather poor, in my opinion, there's no reason to think that a human mind could be 'genetically overclocked' leading to more brain disorders. The human mind is very flexable and a babies education has a huge effect on it's later intelegence. The idea that a certan sub-group of humans has some genetic edge is just a bunch of Racist propaganda, IMO.
posted by delmoi at 11:54 AM on October 23, 2005

Also, overclocking a computer chip will cause it to output more heat energy, because ideal CMOS logic gates would only use energy when they change state. Each time they change state, they use energy, and the more often they use energy, the more power they draw, and change into heat. In the real world, CMOS logic gates use some energy when they aren't changing state, but it still isn't as much as when they do change state.
posted by delmoi at 11:56 AM on October 23, 2005

The person who wrote that clearly knows very little about computers and you shouldn't trust anything that author has to say about them. In fact, since it sounds as though the author is just setting up a metaphor for something else, I wouldn't trust them at all...

semmi, did you translate that passage into English that from another language? It reads oddly.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:45 PM on October 23, 2005

Response by poster: Supercharging a computer’s brain capacity by weakening it, then means: "Sometimes you get away with it, sometimes you don't."

And delmoi, you may be interested in this.
posted by semmi at 1:55 PM on October 23, 2005

Response by poster: i_am_joe's_spleen: 09scar nailed it.
posted by semmi at 2:05 PM on October 23, 2005

Best answer: > I'm reading in an essay: �Overclocking,� the
>term programmers use to describe super-
>charging a computer�s brain capacity
> by weakening it." Could somebody
>explain this in laymen terms?

In laymens terms, the author of this sentence was trying to say something clever, but they missed. Car guys supercharge cars, but programmers do not "supercharge" computers. Twenty years ago you might have been able to say that an arithmatic co-processor "supercharged" a machine, but that's not really the case any more.

Overclocking is a hardware term. It means that you take a CPU rated at say, 1 gigahertz, and you try running it at 1.2 Gigahertz, see what happens. Sometimes it works, sometimes you crash the system. This is not something a programmer would do.

>supercharging a computer�s brain capacity by weakening it.

A computer doesn't have a brain capacity, they don't have brains. When you overclock a system you get more speed, but you lose stability. This sentence needs to be somewhat interpreted back into English.

Other people in this thread have brought in the whole Ashkenazi/IQ business, so I am going to assume that this is the subject the author was actually working on.

The latest Ashkenazi/IQ controversey suggests that maybe some AK are "smarter" because they were bred for it, that the mechanism involved is changes in genes that regulate interconnections between neurons in the brain, that more interconections = certain kinds of smarts. The downside of this is that they may have certain genetic disorders that result from having too many connections in the brain, to the point where it doesn't work right.

*If* this is what the author was trying to refer to, then he was trying to draw an analogy between computers, that if you push them faster they can sometimes go faster, but sometimes crash, and some AK human beings (who are not actually thinking faster, but rather wider/deeper) may come out smarter, but who also might come out with say,Tay-Sachs disease, and die in infancy instead.

There are other genetic conditions such as Thalassema and Sickle Cell Anemia that are caused by too much of a gene that is usefull in small amounts, so there could be something to the writers analogy, although he should really just tear it down and do it up properly from the start.

Note: There are a lot of different kinds of intelligence and no one is saying that ALL of the AK are good at ALL of them, but rather that some of them are good at certain types of abstract thinking.
posted by Ken McE at 2:12 PM on October 23, 2005

People overclock their chips because they know that the manufacturer's clock speed is basically set by quality control. That is, they'll take a sample from a batch, test it at 1.0 GHz (for example), and if the sample fails that test, then they test it at 0.9 GHz and so forth until it passes. That's the "rated" clock speed the chip will have. Doesn't mean it can't be run faster, but reliability will suffer as noted.
posted by dhartung at 3:56 PM on October 23, 2005

By "weaken" the author may have been referring to how, when you overclock a processor, it runs hotter. This will make it more likely to fail, and also decrease the over all lifespan.

The "supercharging" metaphor is not accurate. A slightly better car metaphor for what overclocking does would be that when you overclock a processor, you are essentially opening the throttle wider. An even better metaphor would be that you are removing the restrictor plates that keep it from going over the (arbitrarily defined) speed limit. But metaphors only go so far. :)

And as said above, it has nothing, really, to do with programming. It's a hardware thing.
posted by Hildago at 7:51 PM on October 23, 2005

Response by poster: Thank you all!
posted by semmi at 8:24 PM on October 23, 2005

another thing to point out, i think, is that the reason it's such a touchy science is that other components of the system are expecting the system to run at spec speed. a real simple example of this might be upping the bus speed to increase proc speed (proc speed = bus speed * some multiplier)... of course this tends to confused various interrupts and timing along the bus (hard drive controller, sound card, RAM esp), or some such.

so if you get unlucky, nothing boots at all. your RAM is looking for x bus speed and you bumped it to y, lockdown.

you may get lucky and everything boots until the sound card tries to run its IRQ and then spatters its digital brains all over your case. metaphorically.

or, you get really lucky and everything starts up and runs fine and faster than normal, but you suffer intermittent, undiagnosable problems and constantly due to timers jumping bits here and there..., or chips overheating and shorting...

and finally, lest we forget, the increased heat and the increased number of instructions inevitably causes actual physical damage to your processor, radically shortening its lifespan (e.g., when i stepped a 1.33 athlon to 1.5 and eventually had to drop it down to 1.0 just to run it stable)

did i derail this thread? overclocking sucks. your computer is more likely to break, so you're losing money trying to make shitty components perform beyond their spec on theoretically important applications, causing your system to be unstable. better to by 1 good computer on a payment plan rather than buy 2 jacked-up computers worth of parts over that span and go through a lot of grief.

hell, it almost not worth the trouble to overclock video cards, but since games are the only thing really taxing your system (and not your proc), i'd spend your time there adding huge-O heat-sinks and putting nice reliable stuff elsewhere. oh, and it has to have a spoiler.

seriously, you don't use your CPU for high performance stuff these days, and the benefits from overclocking are maginal at best. keep your registry cruft clean, firewall your computer, [/. demon]oh yeah, and run a decent operating system[/./, begone!]
posted by spiderwire at 10:18 PM on October 23, 2005