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back to article Overclocking for servers

Bring up the topic of overclocking to the major system manufacturers and you hear a variety of responses ranging from ‘we’re plenty fast enough now – take a look at our _____ (insert benchmark here) that’s enabled by our use of ___________(insert techno feature here)” to “it’s just not safe, son, and our customers need to be …

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  1. Sutekh

    Oh no!

    How long before intel locks all but their highest spec processors down again?

    this idea has come far too late

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Power

    Overclocking means the CPU will use a lot more power - up to a point where the flops/watt is dropping in efficiency. This is very important in supercomputing, less so in a single gaming PC so not quite the same thing....

    http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/power-consumption-overclocking_15.html#sect1

    Having said that IBM already do this with the latest Power7 machines - you can turn off half the cores and have the other half running very fast (overclocked) where single thread performance is important.

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    1. Ammaross Danan
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Not True

      Some processors are able to get a stable 200Mhz-600Mhz OC with no voltage changes. At the +600Mhz end, sometimes the voltage increase need only be +0.01V. Fairly marginal power draw increase (check the Q9505 in your link). Of course, the article need not say that the OC be from a stock 2.4Ghz up to a 4Ghz OC. Likely, they'll push a +400Mhz or so to keep power draw down in a sweet spot. However, if companies are willing to refresh their entire server setup with highest-end premium parts every year, paying a higher power bill might be the least of their concerns.

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