> Overclocking win NOT stress, destroy, disable or in any
> way compromise the processor (or any other part) in the
> Newton. The parts are initially made to do this anyway.
> The only crapshoot is how close your particular chip is
> to the margin.
Dave,
I never thought I'd ever disagree with you. But please allow
me to do so in this one case with all due respect.
Although I'm 100% with you regarding the processor in the
Newton, the previous discussion was of a more general
nature. Apart from that, there are other highly integrated
chips (ASIC's) in the Newton of which I doubt anybody
on this list has a datasheet. I've been waiting for years
for somebody to prove me wrong ;-))
During the year before developing
hardware finally started to loose the challenge I need, I have
developed ASIC's. At that time, fairly highly integrated ones
with about 250.000 gates. And I was told that some of those
were killed by accidently using the wrong clock generator.
As you correctly pointed out, processors from the same die
are tested and labeled with the highest frequency at which
they work reliably. This means of course that many processors
were originally designed for a higher frequency and will
work within their initial specification even if overclocked
(up to a certain point).
But (please be gentle and correct me if I'm wrong) this does
also mean that there are *some* components that *do* work
at the frequency they were initially designed for. If the
production line is working as it should, I'd expect *most*
of the components to fall into the latter category.
Although assuming
that these tests allow for some safety margin even for those
components, I'd expect this margin to be comparatively tight.
If a 1 GHz processor would work reliably at 1.2 GHz, it would
probably be sold as a 1.2 GHz processor.
In my humble opinion one can't
make a general statement when it comes to
overclocking. The outcome depends on many factors. Chip technology,
gate count, physical gate size, availability
or absence of automatic heat protection circuitry within the
chip, redundancy in the external cooling system etc. etc. etc.
Clocking a processor specified with 1 Ghz
with twice that frequency might be tempting fate. Clocking it
with 100 MHz more might make no difference whatsoever.
Frank
Newton hardware and software at http://www.pda-soft.de
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