Professional Overclocking

[Nephilumos]

While Simon Solotko works at Advanced Micro Devices his views and this post are completely his own. AMID and SingularityMark are pure and unadulterated fiction.

 

Late april fool's joke.... <_<

Really had me going there for a second.

[Comp Dude2]

I would have thought the engineers designing new semi-conductors would have a pretty good idea of what their hardware is capable of, without giving it to someone who knows very little about it, to play with.

 

They wont just pick the default clock speeds at random, nor will they make a semi-conductor and they ramp up the frequency to see how it performs, they will know what to expect in advance. So, i cant see the use of "overclockers" other than advertising their product as something special, something more exciting than it already is.

[PeeWee90]

It basically falls into a category of a dream job like a video game tester

It's not THAT great i tell you...

[SenitaL]

It's not THAT great i tell you...

 

Testers are at the bottom of the line in game production, Totally expendable and low payed. Their job isnt as glorified as its made out. A tester has to sit there for hours on end playing the same bits over and over to find any bugs or problems, and report any to the QA team. Theres also the hardware testers who have to sit there playing the game over and over on countless different System configurations to make sure the game works fine with all configs. Not my idea of fun..

[64NOMIS]

Late april fool's joke.... <_<

Really had me going there for a second.

 

What still bothers me is that I think it's a really good idea. Sure, we already have ScienceMark but this is like ScienceMark with a cause.

 

For more on SingularityMark you can check it out here.

Edited April 11, 2010 by 64NOMIS

[64NOMIS]

I would have thought the engineers designing new semi-conductors would have a pretty good idea of what their hardware is capable of, without giving it to someone who knows very little about it, to play with.

 

They wont just pick the default clock speeds at random, nor will they make a semi-conductor and they ramp up the frequency to see how it performs, they will know what to expect in advance. So, i cant see the use of "overclockers" other than advertising their product as something special, something more exciting than it already is.

 

This is not a short conversation. I might at least bend your conclusions a bit.

 

If customers care about out-of-spec operation (like going more than 65MPH) then you had better design for it. Extreme OC puts you well beyond any reasonable design or test considerations, but you try to make that exporation possible, even if you, as a manufacturer, will not test it.

 

It turns out that low temperature testing, extreme OC, is not trivial. It also turns out that as you work to improve an ASIC there are unexpected consequences for extreme operation. That is part of the discovery process. Because time-to-market is very fast, and last revisions can perform differently for often uknown reasons, experience has taught me that the community discovers a lot about a part. Even if under unrealistic operating conditions. Nevertheless, interesting to see how, at the extreme, a speed path optimization, and improvement to power handling, a change to a memory controller, a process modification impact a piece of silicon, as tested at the outer limits.

[ccokeman]

Yep. That's what I was told.

 

The only guy I know who's overclocking for a living is Sami M

[Bosco]

Ya there is a ton of guys that do overclocking for a living, and they make 7 and 8 figures doing it depending on who they are.

 

Sami is not the only one and was never the first to start.

 

You want to do it for a living break a world record and you will be on your way.

[ccokeman]

Wheres that damn Ln2 pot........It's somewhere around here....

[hardnrg]

You want to do it for a living break a world record and you will be on your way.

Not surprisingly, this is the simple answer.

 

If you want to do it for a living, you have to be ******* good at it

 

If you can't break into the Top 100 at hwbot or ORB, just give up

 

 

Give up the pipe dream of doing it for a living... not altogether

[kingdingeling]

Says the one who's ranked 2172nd Steve