Google Nexus S Processor Overclocked To 1.2GHz 78
dkd903 writes "Though Google's Nexus S is powered by a single core Hummingbird processor, it looks like the one core would be enough to put LG's dual-core processor powered Optimus to shame. An XDA Forums user morfic has overclocked the processor on Nexus S up to 1.2GHz in a new kernel based on the Bionix NS1 mod."
So... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
Funny as it seems, but overclocking could sometime save battery life as it could alter the default voltage usage of a particular frequency. At least, this is the case of Nokia N900 with Titan's Kernel Power, where we could choose 'starving' profile for overclocking with less voltage than default. Say it can run at almost half as much voltage at 600Mhz than normal. (fyi. N900 can be overclocked to 1.15GHz max. with Kernel Power)
That's not necessarily overclocking -- see also, undervolting or even underclocking.
On my Droid 1, I do all three: It runs at, IIRC, 1GHz, some of the time. Its lowest clock speed is 125MHz, where it spends most of its time (half of the default lowest rate of 250MHz). And all of these speeds are at lower voltage than default.
In the end, it's about a wash: I get a faster device for about the same battery life as I had at stock clocks. Heat generation is about the same, by my estimation, in common use.
None of this is particularly new: I have a fanless, diskless K6-2 350 that gets used for some realtime audio processing tasks using KX audio drivers. It is equipped with a big heatsink, clocked down to 200MHz, and running at low voltage. The hard drive is a CF card on an IDE bus.
It's stable as a champ, doesn't make a peep, and never gets too warm. (These days there's better options for that sort of work, with Atom and SSD, but it was the best I could come up with back then, and it still works just as well today as it did then.)
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While I'm not familiar with this particular processor, in a great many of these lower-power chips you can get significant overclocking gains without noteworthy increased heat. The Pandora, for example, sports an OMAP3530 SoC (which includes an ARM Cortex V8) rated at 600mhz. People have overclocked this to 1ghz with no heat issues and only minor losses in battery life (the chip doesn't remain at maximum speed but underclocks itself when not under load).
It's not like overclocking a normal desktop processor
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The fastest speed at a given voltage is always the most efficient, so overclocking is really only a battery killer if you run at higher than stock voltages to reach the top speeds.
n900 also becomes both faster and more efficient by disabling the 125 and 250 mhz frequencies. This is because they use very similar low voltages, with nokia's kernel they are close, and some of the other voltage profiles commonly used with titan's kernel they are identical. So it's better to do x cycles of work at 500mhz and slee
Hummingbird (Score:5, Funny)
Does the Hummingbird processor require more nectar when it's overclocked?
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Sweet!
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Just wondering...
If you put a Nexus processor running Android into sleep mode,
does it dream of electric sheep?
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No, but if you overclock it too far, it will go backwards.
1.2GHz pretty standard (Score:1)
Don't really see this as a huge amount of news the old snapdragons have been running at 1.2GHz (well 1.19 anyways) with the same base 1GHz speed for ages.
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GigaHertzes don't mean anything. Some processors are faster than others at the same clock speed. I believe the Cortex A8 (in the iPhone 3GS, Motorola Milestone/Droid, and I think also the N900) is at 600 MHz about as fast as a Snapdragon at 800Mhz. In the Milestone/Droid, it can be overclocked to at least 1GHz, which would be faster than a 1.2GHz Snapdragon.
So what we really need to know is how fast this Hummingbird really is. Not in GHz, but in actual computation.
Really?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that the LG Optimus 2x - also known as the Star - benchmarks pretty impressively, I doubt a Nexus S overclock will put it to shame. In the quadrant benchmark the Nexus S has been noted as obtaining a score of 1474 [nexusoneforum.net], whilst the Star scores 1759 [mobilecrunch.com].
Assuming linear scaling from 1ghz, the Nexus S would obtain 1769 with android 2.3 whilst the star manages the previously stated 1759 with android 2.2 which has received fewer performance optimisations. Whilst this is only one benchmark, the more graphically focussed ones favour the Star's tegra (nVidia) processor to an even greater extent.
Therefore far from putting the new dual core Optimus to shame, I would argue that an overclocked Nexus S can just about keep level with it whilst using a faster OS version on benchmarks that favour it. Hardly putting the Star to shame...
Re:Really?? (Score:5, Informative)
Quadrant is a pretty flawed test. [briefmobile.com]
That said, based on some other benchmarks and their respective specs, tegra2 has roughly 2.5x more CPU power compared to the hummingbird SOC. (1ghz A9 runs 25% faster than 1ghz A8, and tegra 2 is a dual core A9) Anadtech's Linpack scores seem to show that too. [anandtech.com] (Ignore the bloated snapdragon class scores, it has floating point performance optimisations) Article here [anandtech.com]
GPU performance is where it gets interesting. It seems like the PowerVR 540 GPU on the hummingbird SoC is better than the GPU used in the Tegra 2 SoC. Odd considering nVidia make the tegra2. Instances where Tegra 2 outperforms the hummingbird in GPU benchmarks are as far as i can tell down to the extra CPU power (roughly 250% faster)
Samsung's upcoming [engadget.com] Orion chip also looks promising, and is a closer match to the Tegra 2.
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GPU performance is interesting, I guess, but it's interesting for different reasons to me than it seems to be for you:
I, for one, am not surprised that PowerVR is doing better in this sector than nVidia, with the former having lost all relevance in the desktop and portable market, and the latter having spent the past few years trying to beat up ATI/AMD as top dog on the desktop. That PowerVR has a superior low-performance offering is really not very interesting.
What is interesting is that people think that
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And I have probably 80% of the top 3D games for Android on my X. It's kind of neat playing Asphalt 5/NFS-Shift on the big-screen TV from my phone (at standard definition).
With that said, I haven't found any Android games yet that I've played for more than 1 hour at a time. None are particularly interesting.
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I'm not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. Most of the benchmarks of real-world games -- while they are a bit rare -- show the Tegra 2 as being slightly faster; take Quake 3, for instance. Neocore is particularly slow on Tegra 2 because it's a benchmark made by Qualcomm that targets tile-based rendering and also offloads a lot of the FP workload to the CPU (where Tegra 2 is particularly bad).
Realistically, Tegra 2 is pretty much a beast of a chip, but I'm curious about its power numbers.
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I'd say quite the opposite really. The CPU's are good at integer and branchy type stuff that the GPU can't do anyway. But the A9 implementation they chose is a really really really stripped down FPU.
The GPU is what's pulling the weight in graphics related tasks.
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Is any of this related to Samsung getting the DEC Alpha after Intel picked the bones?
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And? (Score:5, Informative)
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totally otherwise unnoticable performance gain.
Bullshit.
My Droid came out of the box at 550 MHz. I over clock it to 1.2 GHz and experience significant performance gains. Programs start faster, there isn't any menu stuttering, the web browser scrolls smoothly, etc. At stock speeds, the phone runs okay but not nearly as well as with the over clock. It also helps with things like emulation, flash, pdf rendering, you name it, over clocking makes it better.
And the really beautiful thing about it all... the battery life is actually better thanks to t
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What kind of masochistic drive compels people to be so obsessed with all kinds of stuff painfully displayed on a screen less lengthy and girthy than my cock?
Those who want to use their phones as navigation assistants which don't choke horribly under the stress posed by running on 1st/2nd-generation hardware?
Oh. Sorry... was I not supposed to burst your shell of arrogance with an actual real-world example?
-- not the GP. I've owned a G1 (OCed heavily), N1 (briefly), and now a Droid X (undervolted).
I too had a G1, ran a number of alternative ROMs and finally settled on Cyanogenmod. I also overclocked the hell out of it. Never had a problem with the thing stability-wise either. It was about as good as a G1 was ever going to get, although when I had it running as a Wi-Fi hotspot it could get kinda warm.
Now I have a G2, and I normally run on-demand between 245 and 800 Mhz (I run Cyanogenmod 6.1 with the Pershoot kernel) for ordinary use, but there are times when I want to multitask. I'll have Google N
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Imagine that. More than doubling the clock on your D1 showed significant performance gain. So, that's like replacing that Civic engine with a V6 at double the HP. Bet you see some performance gain from that, too.
However, going from 1 GHz to 1.2 GHz.......yeah, not so much. That IS just like adding the fart-pipe and getting a barely-noticeable 25 extra HP on your Civic.
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Is 20 percent "barely-noticeable"?
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Agreed, especially considering the feature sets and straight execution efficiency that are added to the new chips. I have a 4 year old windows mobile smartphone overclocked from 500MHz to 700MHz. Sure, launching an app is fractions of a second faster..barely noticeable, but compared to a *modern* 650MHz, it's not really even marginally usable, especially graphics performance, which will be the case in this example too.
You just can't compete with advances in technology...get the newer model and overclock THA
Nothing to see here... (Score:5, Interesting)
How is this news? The year old Motorola Droid (also using an ARM Cortex A8 core) was overclocked to 1.2 GHz quite a while ago (as with all overclocking, it works fine with some units, not so well with others). I understand the Hummingbird has had some microcode tweaks, and so is a bit more efficient than the OMAP (5-10%), but that's mice nuts. This isn't news, or even very interesting outside of Nexus S owner circles.
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Aye... even the G2, with its stock speed of 800mhz, can easily hit 1.2ghz, and most can hit 1.5ghz without any problems other than reduced battery life.
What do you mean, "even the G2"? That's a fast phone. I can overclock it to 1.5 Ghz easily, like you said. But you're both right: the fact that a Nexus S can hit 1.2 gigs really isn't all that noteworthy in the overall scheme of things.
... I think you'll find that you'll gain a lot more life by keeping track of what your applications are doing, and getting rid of the poorly-written ones and those that run unnecessary background t
I personally haven't really had any issues with reduced battery life though
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"works fine" is difficult to determine (Score:2)
... as with all overclocking, it works fine with some units, not so well with others ...
Judging an overclocked CPU to be working fine is quite tricky. Not all overclocking induced failures are catastrophic or otherwise noticeable. Sometimes the failure is as simple as giving an incorrect answer, a 1+2=4 for example.
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... as with all overclocking, it works fine with some units, not so well with others ...
Judging an overclocked CPU to be working fine is quite tricky. Not all overclocking induced failures are catastrophic or otherwise noticeable. Sometimes the failure is as simple as giving an incorrect answer, a 1+2=4 for example.
Very true, and the CPU isn't the only issue. The stock speed that most phone vendors run their phones is often less than half of the processor's rated speed. So you can generally run the CPU quite a bit faster without it having any problems. Unfortunately, the rest of the components in the system may not be rated for the higher clock rate. Memory, for example.
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The stock speed that most phone vendors run their phones is often less than half of the processor's rated speed. So you can generally run the CPU quite a bit faster without it having any problems.
To elaborate on "generally" ...
Running the CPU at its rated speed may generate more heat than the design of a particular device can accommodate. The design may only be within its thermal specs when the CPU is running at its reduced clock rate. Excess heat can cause incorrect results even if the clock rate is OK.
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The stock speed that most phone vendors run their phones is often less than half of the processor's rated speed. So you can generally run the CPU quite a bit faster without it having any problems.
To elaborate on "generally" ...
Running the CPU at its rated speed may generate more heat than the design of a particular device can accommodate. The design may only be within its thermal specs when the CPU is running at its reduced clock rate. Excess heat can cause incorrect results even if the clock rate is OK.
Very true, although if your OS has a CPU governor that dynamically adjusts the CPU clock based upon demand, you can probably get away with a lot. Average heating will be a lot less if the CPU is only responding to peak loads.
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I have an OMAP 3 (Beagle board) running over clocked at 720MHz tasked with a Knight's tour solver it's been running for 6 weeks, on Angstrom. It draws about 1Watt (Video & audio turned off). To date it has solved 38M tours and 8.4B traversals from start pos . The current minimum depth is 24. I haven't even gotten the DSP into the mix yet. With a bit more work I could get this system to run 24/7/365 off a battery backed supply and add DSP solving support. I can let this sucker run for years if
Overclocking != Dual Core (Score:5, Insightful)
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I want to see duals in Androids as much as you do, but laptops took forever to get dual cores compared to desktops, and netbooks are a year or two older, but are *still* waiting for that tech (and they're waay underpowered and under-RAM'd as is.)
Cellphones, which don't have "core fever" due to different marketting than PCs, will take forever to justify the performance/battery life drawbacks. Forever, unless phones REALLY become just another PC running full-blown Windows. We do not want to go back to Window
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Dual core devices are not new. The HTC Wizard had this in '05. However, the phone had separate cores so the radio could do what it needed to while the OS was able to do what it needed, both cores running at a fairly low clock speed. The device had a pretty amazing battery life though.
I'd like to see multiple cores... perhaps fast and slow (but battery saving) cores and a smart process scheduler. This would go a way to help with battery life, as well as provide smoother performance for apps.
Re:Overclocking != Dual Core (Score:5, Informative)
That's not dual core... All current smartphones use that... One Application CPU that runs Android/Symbian/iPhoneOS/whatever and another CPU inside the modem that runs the GSM stack on a RTOS... Only very low end phones run the GSM stack on the app processor...
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One Application CPU that runs Android/Symbian/iPhoneOS/whatever and another CPU inside the modem that runs the GSM stack on a RTOS... Only very low end phones run the GSM stack on the app processor...
Actually, of those OSs, Symbian is the only one capable of running the OS and baseband on the same CPU. Not that Nokia uses that feature for the high end phones.
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netbooks are a year or two older, but are *still* waiting for that tech (and they're waay underpowered and under-RAM'd as is.)
Atom-based netbooks can already run two threads with hyperthreading, so it's less of an issue. A dual-core Atom adds a sizable amount of power consumption and needs four threads to max it out; because of in-order execution there are usually plenty of stalls where the single core Atom can run a second thread at no cost to the first.
Cellphones, which don't have "core fever" due to different marketting than PCs, will take forever to justify the performance/battery life drawbacks.
The company I was working for in 2005 was building dual-core ARM chips for such lower-power devices; putting two low-frequency ARMs into a single chip ended up giving us the same
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Motorola and LG IIRC are releasing ones in early 2011.
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I know linux is obviously SMP enabled etc but does anyone know how well optimized Android is for taking advantage of multiple cores and scheduling? How about iOS? (I assume it has Grand Central/blocks etc) How useful could it possibly be? As best practices backgrounded apps should either be suspended or at the very least certainly not burning CPU with reckless abandon. I understand that maybe games and certain uses (video encoding? isn't it hardware assisted already?) would get increased performance from pa
Errm... (Score:2)
I'm not seeing how a 200MHz overclock puts a phone with a 1000MHz aggregate clockspeed advantage to shame...
Sure, performance doesn't scale linearly, but I'll still take a dual-core 1GHz Cortex A9 over a 1.2GHz single-core Cortex A8-alike any day.
definite article? (Score:2)
An XDA Forums user morific has
How many morifics are there on the XDA Forums?
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Seven maybe, but there's possibly over a hundred horonics perhaps, but not really.
Isn't technology wonderful? (Score:2)
I remember like 10 years ago when somebody converted a big ass A/C unit into a chip cooler and overclocked a Pentium III to 1.0 GHz, and it was a big deal...now here we are discussing PHONES that come OUT OF THE BOX with 1.0 GHz, running Quake 3, like it ain't no thang. Gotta love Moore's Law.
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meh, it was a big deal when an el cheapo Celeron 300 was overclocked to 450MHz routinely, with no special hardware. Almost enough to decode DVDs in real time :-)
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Because at the time, there were no 1GHz processors available.
New tech (Score:1)
How is this news? (Score:3)
The Samsung Galaxy S and it's cousins have the exact same processor and it was overclocked too 1.2 Ghz 3 months ago.
Is it news because it has Google in the title? Seeing how Samsung makes the phone and it is basically a copy of the galaxy S with a few minor changes, I don't see why this is new news.
Wonderful! (Score:2)