>> 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.
> Entirely possible. But how much was the difference? Was it 1MHz, 10MHz
> 100MHz etc. faster.
I think if was in the range of an order of magnitude of ten (do you say so
if you mean
"ten times more than allowed"?)
> If the part was designed for say, 50MHz, clocking with
> 60MHz would do no harm. Now it may not work but it would be ok. Try
clocking
> with orders of magnitude above that and all bets are off.
Yep, that was what I was trying to get across. There's no general statement
about
the potential risk of overclocking. It always depends on the circumstances.
>> 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.
> Not sure I understand what you are trying to say here, Frank.
I understood your point was that most chips will survive overclocking
because most likely they were initially built for a higher frequency and
just failed some test at that frequency which they didn't fail at a lower
frequency. So overclocking (at least up to the freqency they *might*
have worked at if they hadn't failed the test) doesn't move them
outside their initial specs as far as temperature is concerned.
This is certainly correct, but there are also those components that did
not fail this test and are thus operated at the maximum frequency the
chip was designed for. Overclocking one like that will move it out of
its specification more easily than overclocking one of the others by
the same amount.
> Yes, but the difference between 1GHz and 1.2GHz is 200MHz!
> Hardly a small increment!
Couldn't agree more. Further proof for what I mean: There's no general
statement possible when it comes to overclocking.
> Sure can! Like anything else, it depends on what you are generalizing and
> how generalized you want to be. (Does that make sense??)
Kind of ;-))
Reminds me of what my physics professor once asked: Is the
statement "There is no rule without an exception" a rule or not?
(please answer that one off-list, everybody. I've started too many off topic
threads lately...)
> Of course, opinions are like a**holes;
> Everyone's got one and everyone thinks the other persons' stinks!
I would never dare to think anything even close to that of *your*
opinion!
Best regards
Frank
Newton hardware and software at http://www.pda-soft.de
-- Read the List FAQ/Etiquette: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html Read the Newton FAQ: http://www.guns-media.com/mirrors/newton/faq/ This is the NewtonTalk mailing list - http://www.newtontalk.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sun May 05 2002 - 14:05:06 EDT