Overclock the N900?
 

There was an earlier thread (which I can't find for love nor money) but i wanted to maybe discuss the viability of an overclock app.

Looks like the Stock CPU at 100% is clocked at 600Mhz and im guessing there is a 10% leeway on tolerances built in there.

A lot of people slated the option to overclock but Manufacturers need to take into account a lot of variables when specifying clock settings and im pretty sure we could squeeze more power out of this device if it is possible to force higher 100% clock speeds.

Not sure what the operating temperature range is for this device but it can probably operate at 100% in fairly high ambient temperatures which suggests that there is probably more scope for overclocking than people may imagine.

Remember that this device is configured to work worldwide, in hot climates as well as cold.

I'm no expert in mobile devices but i know a fair amount about components and tolerances in kit that comes to market so if anyone has any input feel free to rubish my claims or add any additional info.

I would suggest that 625MHZ should be eaily obtained but im pretty sure you could have a stable device at 650MHZ running at 100% for long periods with no issues if you can clock just the CPU and leave other bus speeds at specification. I havent looked into the architecture of the device but does anyone know the the CPU and GPU can be clock modified individually or do they share the same bus with each other or any other components such as memory?

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I'd be wary, its not as if there is a nice CMOS jumper to clear the bios if you muck things up.

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No but i woudl have thought that clock speed is software controled so if you were to brick to the point where it does not boot then you should be able to reflash.

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Before I start out, I'll add a little disclaimer saying I know very little about the specifics of stuff like this.

I guess there'd be no problems even running it at >800mhz as it'd be idle with very few cycles running most of the time. However, one runaway process which wouldn't be uncommon on a device like the N900 could spell disaster...

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I'm seeing a new category for the Darwin Awards emerging ;)

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Ah, silly comments starting already? How helpful.


If you knew anything about the architecture of CPU installed in the N900 you may retract that comment.

Educate yourself:
http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM_Cortex-A8.html

Re: Overclock
 

I don't know enough about the gritty details, but on the Summit, at the OMAP3 power presentation Igor Stoppa (and he's no n00b when it comes to Maemo HW :D ) very explicitly said - please don't overclock it - it WILL fry.

Re: Overclock
 

Lighten up dude....google "emoticons" and educate yourself ;)


If you vape your hardware somehow, rest assured that I have a whole bag full of ....

http://www.gearfuse.com/wp-content/u...lson-muntz.gif

... with your name on it.

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The link you provided is too general for this purpose. The "up to 1GHz" doesn't apply to all Cortex A8:s.

However, the ARM Cortex A8 600MHz found in the OMAP3430 SoC can easily be overclocked to >850MHz.

The Omnia HD, with an identical SoC (not only identical CPU) to the N900, is overclocked to 800MHz by default (see pic below). In comparison, the Iphone 3GS has an 833MHz chip, but is underclocked to 600MHz by default. Now, which is better? ;)

http://mysymbian.neostrada.pl/Omnia/cpuOmnia.jpg

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Wow, let's overclock it - then it will be less stable, with shorter battery life.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Sorry guys, I came from Win Moibile devices and the guys over at XDA pretty much liked pushing the boundries of devices they had.

The vast majority of custom firmwares are better than the manufaturers by a mile and they have overclocked devices successfully.

IF you read my original post i was asking for comments, not possible would have sufficed.

Strange that other devices have successfully been tweeked and clocked to improve performance and that this device apparantly cant run over 600MHZ or it will fry. Granted i probably posted in the wrong section but guys, seriously..... You guys are acting like we are in the 1800's and im suggesting bulding a machine called a helicopter that can hover. Yep, impossible... go away nutter :)

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An Overclocking app would be cool.

I ran one on my old G1 and Mytouch with no problems. Rooted, of course.

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What does it mean?
With the ability to scale in speed from 600MHz to greater than 1GHz, the Cortex-A8 processor can meet the requirements for power-optimized mobile devices

Does it mean that N900's A8 3430 can scale automatically upto 1 Ghz without any problem?or without overclocking?

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Well i was hoping if the thread developed Underclocking certain cpu states could be discussed, that is also a perfomance gain.

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Unfortunately no, it doesn't, not even close (maybe somewhat close). That article just mentions which ARM Cortex A8:s are currently availible.

That's why I said that the link doesn't say anything about overclocking. Nonetheless, the 3430 can be overclocked (see my previous post).

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No. 1GHZ is almost certainly impossible. I would have hoped that 10% above stock would be achievable but a few people dissagree.

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I haven't really seen complaints about the performance of N900. I think most of us here are more interested in stability and and battery life than pimping our hardware to the fullest. Sure, i've got curiosity what could be done with the N900 processor, but it wouldn't be useful to me, and i suspect any detailed discussion about how to do so on T.M.O would be a net negative in my book. We get enough new incoherent thread titles with too many periods or all CAPS without threads here that actually do describe a way to fry the hardware. :eek:

Re: Overclock
 

the n900 is using the ondemand scaler, It spends most of its time underclocked already, and it is *off* when idle.

So it's doing it already:

# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/stats/time_in_state
600000 727872
550000 4914
500000 6771214
250000 19473164

In other words, most of the time it's 250mhz, when its running at all.

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That is not entirely true. This isnt a noob overclock forum.

It could be possible to tweak clock settings for a 5-10% boost to 100% CPU state and reduce the cycles of and lower CPU states, which could even INCREASE battery life depending on the device usage.

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It could be nice to be able to tweak CPU though, id love to play with the stock power states and first step would defo be an underclock on the low power states, if everything in 'almost idle' ran fine at 200mhz then you could see a potential boost to battery life.

Now im begining to think I made a schoolboy error int he Thread title......

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Yup, i think what you actually wanted was to run a search on "powertop" and join this thread.

Edit: That's not the thread i was remembering. T.M.O search fails again. :D

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What I'd be more interested in is to stop the CPU from scaling down to 500 then 250Mhz. I want it run at 600 all the time.

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Yeah I think all the negative responses are because stability and power conservation are bigger issues right now, whereas there's more than enough performance for anything mildly sane you might want to do with an N900...that said, if you want to risk your unit, it looks like 800Mhz would be quite safe for the CPU since other devices with the same hardware are running this clock speed right out of the box. The only issue is if it might cause a problem with other hardware - these devices weren't made to take different hardware so you never know. I'd try increments of 10Mhz or so until you reach 800 stable if you want to go through with this - remember there may be no way to reset the clock speed. You can't reflash if it doesn't boot because the clock speed is too high.

Overclock with a low battery - this will make it glitch out more easily. That way when you plug it into an AC power source and the voltage increases a bit, it should make the CPU a little more stable (this is how it works in PC overclocking anyways) and give you a chance to reset the clock.

Edit: BTW disabling the CPU clock scaling is a very bad idea! You'd probably see zero performance increase, and it would eat through your battery like crazy and probably heat up the unit a bit. The CPU's clock speed will increase with demand. This is a good thing. No need to have it running at max speed all the time.

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probably get a 3hr battery life with that setting ! :)

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Who cares? Is the current 4 better?

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Sorry, i saw a really interesting discussion of people using different powertop features but after 10 minutes with power search, i still can't find it. Maybe someone who was participating in it will speak up. Maybe it wasn't powertop they were discussing. Maybe i'm completely off my rocker? :o

BTW, have you met our resident troll? He couldn't get enough attention in the iPhone forum, so he's now living under our bridge.

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Christmas may be over, but ClockworkOrangeBox has donned his gay apparel and come to TMO to troll the ancient yet once again...

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CPU itself has really only some effect on the total use-time. Display eats most of the power, cellmo is eating a lot with network traffic. Having higher speeds usually allows cpu to go back to idle sooner, so, indeed, it might even prolong the battery life if you overclock the CPU. Having said that, I don't especially suggest anybody to do it. I can only say that I have seen it running at 650, so within the suggested 10%.

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Screw it. Someone wants to make an overclocking app, I'll test it. It's not like I paid anything for the phone, anyway. And if it gets bricked, I can afford a new one, and I'll have spare parts for it.

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Not really, I've been monitoring and mine averages 60-70% at 600. I notice a lot of slowdowns and brief non-responsiveness while the CPU is pegged. Why? It 'appears' random, but haven't had the time or energy to mess with finding out.

I don't have a ton installed, a few active widgets and occasionally throw on something from devels. IOW, your usage != others' usage. Mine doesn't sit idle much (unless I'm in the middle of my nightly 3-5 hour nap).

What could possibly go wrong? That's easy, not much else. The question really should be, "what could possibly be more wrong?" As it sits, this thing may as well be a year old looking for a replacement anyway. Seriously. Well, one thing I can say (at least), it has been fairly stable so overclocking may happily take care of that.

I'm always skeptical of overclocking the CPU. A faster CPU alone (esp. small increases) rarely ever means a huge or even noticeable increase in performance. If designed for the 1GHz, then we /should/ notice something, but not knowing much more than superficial, the bus and a device's thermal dynamics will be what struggles. I'm game and have overclocked most anything I can, but lockups tend to increase, reliability drops, heat goes out of bounds causing these issues and longer-term durability problems so the marginal, if any, improvement tends not to be worth it.

I also overclocked my G1, but I couldn't live with the effects - went from rock solid and reliable (assuming I watched memory) to locking up frequently and I (personally) didn't notice any improvement.

BUT, this is Maemo AND the N900 (which I will likely set aside fulltime rather than just using my backup for BT in a couple months for some of the hardware we see in the pipeline) so the biggest question is why the heck not try? People install sketchy apps from devels and muck around with Linux they don't understand and brick the thing all the time anyway. What's the big deal?

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Introduction to Overclocking Guide for Beginners

Enjoy the read if you're interested!

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id be happy if i could clock it to at least 800, but a 5 or 10% isnt gonna make a blind bit of differenece

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There is no need to monitor. Just cat that path and you can see how much you spend at each speed/state.

My hunch would be by monitoring, you'll actually drive up the cpu use, which will drive up the clock speed (thats how ondemand works)

The random pegging most likely has to do with tracker deciding it needs to look over your media again...

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Hold up. Don't confuse the Cortex A8 with the OMAP3430. The Cortex A8 can scale up to 1GHz+ but that doesn't mean the OMAP3430 can. The OMAP3430 is rated at 600MHz. Go above that and you're over clocking, end of story. If you mean other devices with the OMAP3430, please provide references. I would be genuinely interested.

Frank

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Interesting discussion here, folks :) I don't know enough about this hardware to contribute anything useful whatsoever, but this thread is a great read.

Someone tell me how to make it set on teh fiarz plz ;)

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Omnia HD (the only hardware difference being less virtual memory, which has nothing to do with the SoC anyway).

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I've been overclocking my computer's CPU since the 486 days.
First ever overclock was from 486 50mhz to a whopping 60mhz.

If someone can make an overclocking app for N900, I'll use it 100%.
Heck, I'm sure someone will come up with a better cooling solution. =P

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Hi
First, I must say, that I'm a total noob in Linux things, but maybe this link can help you to develop a way to set the clockrate to a fix range. :)

That're the first steps on the Android T-Mob G1.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...=501986&page=4

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The link claims OMAP3430 @ 600MHz as well? If devices come clocked by the manufacturer above 600MHz, that would be interesting to me.

I'm not claiming that you can't overclock the omap3430, just that it's not supposed to be clocked above 600MHz.


Frank

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Is it absolutely certain it's not an OMAP3440 ? It would make a lot more sense.