There's more to overclocking than heat. The metastability period plays a huge role. If you clock the chip too high to account for the metastable period, then you're going to have an unstable chip. No doubts about it.
Given that GPU manufacturers typically clock their chips as high as they can possibly get away with (it's all about performancemaaaaan), it may be that 1.7GHz is as high as the T33 can go.
Keep in mind that's still the fastest Android hardware generally available, bar none. It's not going to put your old GeForce to shame, but it will pump some awesome visuals. :)
I went to OUYA meetup group in London yesterday and although It was amazing to see this little wonder in action I was bit disheartened to hear from OUYA member of staff that there are no plans to overclock Tegra 3 ಠ_ಠ
Too bad I guess but I'm sure there will still be advantages with the console being cooled and plugged into a permanent power source either way.
I was hoping they would be able to get the clock frequency higher than it currently is too but I guess there were ultimately limitations in the architecture.
The tegra line was never meant to be as flexible as its GeForce cousins. Nvidia put more emphasis on cpu power than gpu. They tried to use what they learned while working with Sony on the PS3 as a point of reference 'more cpu, with a lesser gpu', but ARM is no CELL. Imagination Technologies PowerVR line would be more akin to a GeForce card.
This is an area I'm incredibly interested in too. A member of the Ouya team told me that some devs are achieving clocks of 2 GHz to 2.4GHz.
What I would like to know is if any developers here can confirm what clock speeds they are achieving with the hardware (CPU or GPU) and how much the fan and heat sink help facilitate these speeds.
I would like to know what the highest stable clock speeds are and I would like to know if the Ouya GPU clock differs to tablets at all.
Another thing I'm interested to find out is if developers are allowed to sell games on Ouya that push the console architecture more than the standard settings for clock frequency.
I'm guessing that going wild with the overclock might not be a good idea. I think Ouya team should do some stress tests to see how far a stock ouya console can go without glitches or permanent damage.
And if possible, add a permission setting so that games can only overclock if a proper app setting is enabled, as to tell the players the game will overclock their consoles.
There's more to overclocking than heat. The
metastability period plays a huge role. If you clock the chip too high
to account for the metastable period, then you're going to have an
unstable chip. No doubts about it.
Given that GPU manufacturers typically clock their chips as high as they can possibly get away with (it's all about performancemaaaaan), it may be that 1.7GHz is as high as the T33 can go.
Keep
in mind that's still the fastest Android hardware generally available,
bar none. It's not going to put your old GeForce to shame, but it will
pump some awesome visuals. :)
I would think that the T33 is designed as an underclocked processor, really, as it's original purpose is to run on hardware with virtually no cooling. 2Ghz should be alright
Another thing, I'm feeling the reason Ouya went with Tegra 3 was because they were able to get a good deal from nVIDIA and full SoCs manufactured by them directly.
Otherwise, a PowerVR/ARM or ARM Cortex/MALI combo could have been a better option. They have a lot more headroom in terms of the scale and performance of their architecture, and the GPUs are a lot more flexible - more texture units, unified shader architecture, higher shader model support, more OpenGL feature support etc. However, with that they would have had to get a 'middle-man' in to fabricate for them.
Still possible I guess, there would be many takers.
I would think that the T33 is designed as an underclocked processor, really, as it's original purpose is to run on hardware with virtually no cooling. 2Ghz should be alright
Actually, I think the T30 is an underclocked T33, note that T33 is only in the devices with the biggest batteries in them. Which makes sense that the guys who overclocked a Nexus 7 (T30) were only able to get it to go 1.7 to 1.8Ghz before it became unstable.
Comments
The tegra line was never meant to be as flexible as its GeForce cousins. Nvidia put more emphasis on cpu power than gpu. They tried to use what they learned while working with Sony on the PS3 as a point of reference 'more cpu, with a lesser gpu', but ARM is no CELL. Imagination Technologies PowerVR line would be more akin to a GeForce card.
And if possible, add a permission setting so that games can only overclock if a proper app setting is enabled, as to tell the players the game will overclock their consoles.
I would think that the T33 is designed as an underclocked processor, really, as it's original purpose is to run on hardware with virtually no cooling. 2Ghz should be alright