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overclocking

hi, is there any way to overclock the processor on the xperia?

By over clocking do you mean take the Xperia beyond its theoretical headline Limit of 528 mhz ?
I have looked at this but the new processor does not seem to be supported by many of the commercial solutions avaliable.
However SpeedBooster posted on the Turbo Speed X1 thread, allows you to set higher processor priority for the programs you choose, giving them a larger slice of the processor pie, its not overclocking as such, but it does make the processor work faster for the programs you choose.
I have used it for a few days with no serious problems, howvere having the processor running faster will drain battery faster, I have noticed this, but it is within acceptable limits for my needs,
I prefer the extra performance over the extra miliage.

Can you do a benchmark and post the results?
Would help a lot to start making a comparison between devices.

Is this what you're looking for:

Overclocking in Android - some questions and thoughts sharing

Hi all guys! I have a couple of questions and would like to hear some experiences and thoughts in general about overclocking in Android.
First a couple of more specific questions which I would like to have answered, if possible. If it's not possible, please give me your general thoughts anyway about overclock instead of moving to the next thread, please.
- Are there any kernels which allow overclocking beyond 1536 MHz?
- If so, did anybody try those frequencies? What was the result?
- Are there any people who for some reasons did NOT manage to have stable 1536 MHz?
- Are there any reliable reports of people frying their phones due to overclocking?
- Are there any easy ways to undervolt the CPU (at standard frequencies, not overclocked) in order to save some battery charge?
My very little OC experience is based on this: I have been running for some days a ROM based on a kernel which allowed OC up to 1536 MHz. I installed CPU Master Free, did some tests and found out, to my surprise, that the phone will run @1536 MHz without any noticeable issues. I never kept it at that frequency for more than 5 minutes I think, because I was afraid of excessive heat, but the phone never got really hot, just a bit warm. I ran some system benchmarks (Quadrant and another one which I can't recall right now) which stressed a bit the CPU and did not encounter any crashes. I also did this with performance governor which keeps the CPU constantly to the max frequency I think, and still no probs. Since everything works so fine and was that easy, I was wondering why don't everybody always run with the HD2 @1536 MHz. Is it only for battery issues? Please share your ideas about this and OC on the HD2 under Android in general.
Thanks.

The problem with overclocking isn't just overheating or too much power. With overclocking you are also increasing the say, amount of data being passed through the cpu. If the cpu's bus size isn't fast or big enough to handle it, it will ultimately slow down or malfunction.
So you should get the picture of overclocking now. Note however there are some safe speeds for overclocking.
Onto your next question as to why everyone doesn't overclock to the max speed. The reasons are: paranoia and safety of device
You have to know that not every chip is made exactly the same, they are modeled after the same design but are never made the same. So that mean whilst some people's phones may be able to handle extreme overclocking, like yours, others may not be able to, and malfunction/overheat. Malfunctioning like, cannot make phone calls, wifi/GPS doesn't work, etc.
So I hope this was informative.

Not everything you have said was new to me, but you were informative.
...although I would really be surprised to have issues with phone calls for instance caused by excessive overclocking...
Do you personally keep the HD2 overclocked?
Anybody else?

When I had my HD2, I rarely did so. Reason being is that I found no need to. The only times I did do so was to see if the phone actually was faster. In my results however I found no big difference so I didn't bother.

Well, the phone is indeed fast without OC, but you can feel the difference if you are performing some CPU intensive tasks. For example, unzipping a 200 MB ROM archive, or importing 1300 SMS from a backup. A temporary OC can save you maybe 1 minute or 30 secs, which aren't absolutely worth the time you spend learning to overclock the device, but never mind, even if you only saved 5 secs it's worth it for the satisfaction.

Ah I see your point. I was only looking in the perspective of simply tasks such as browsing internet/market, games, gallery.

Figure it this way. When you overclock a pc, (and if you're doing it safely/correctly) you have usually spent extra money on liquid cooling systems. Or at the very least, bigger fans, bigger heatsyncs, etc. Even with all that, you could very easily blow out a cpu or other component when you overclock.
Now, on a cell phone, you're running a MUCH higher risk. First off, there is NO extra cooling, and considering the size of our phones, and how thing they are, there's really no room for airflow. So while yes, it may work for you, in general I always say getting those couple extra frames per second out of your game are not worth the potential damage to the device.
Overclocking on actual computers has gotten much safer in the last few years, because the chip designers are putting more effort into keeping the chip cooler under load. Cell phones are not designed to overclock (even one as sweet as the hd2.)
Lastly, when overclocking a system (desktop), you usually change more than just the cpu clock speed. You'll usually have to adjust the voltage to compensate, and in some cases adjust memory timing as well as bus speed. None of this happens when you overclock on the hd2, all you do is change the clock speed.
It's not set in stone, but there's a very real possibility that you can do permanent damage to your device when overclocking. And, you may not notice the damage right away. Also keep in mind, these are mass produced cpu's, and there are slight variations in each chip. (Hence why some people can overclock higher and keep stability, while some phones with the same chip get picky if you even overclock 10mhz )
I've never seen the point in overclocking the hd2, you really don't get any real world speed out of it, it's a placebo at best. (And please don't start showing me or quoting benchmarks, they're useless, and extremely easy to make little changes in the roms to artificially boost benchmark scores.)
Edit: For more info, because I'm tired of typing, check these links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overclocking
http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Computer_Science/2005/overclocking.asp

Great info mstrk242,
Thank you!

All benchmark info is skewed. Tried 1500mhz and the only app I noticed a difference on was gun bros. A new more efficient version of rom made it run fine at 998mhz. Not worth the extra wear and tear on your device. Simply changing things like your launcher can have larger effects.
Sent from my HyperDroid powered HD2!

2nd Core App Questions

so now that the latest beta of siyah kernel supports enabling/disabling of the 2nd core, and tegrak already released an app for it, i just want to know the possible effects in performance/battery if you use the different options of the 2nd core app.. especially when we use the single core option.. so what will happen to our phone when we run HD games, and im sure that it will extend the battery life, just not sure how the phone will behave with only 1 core running.. and will it be bad for our phone to only run at a single core..
and also, am i right to assume that our phone has the option "dynamic hotplug" by default?

Shouldn't see much of a decrease in the performance. The sgs has a single core yet the cpu can still handle anything thrown against it. Point being there is nothing out that demands dual core performance. On another note note, hd games are not actually gd. It is just advertising point for game developers.
$1 gets you a reply

Using one core instead won't break your cpu. It gonna make your phone cooler ( ! core is running producing less heat and the heat dissipator is made for the dual core ) and have a better battery life obviously. It will, obviously too, slow down your phone, but the speed lost is to be determined. You might want to test it out to see if it's getting laggy or simply suck. As already said, the SGS I has a 1Ghz proc and can handle most of the top recent content available so with a 1.2 Ghz single core, you should be able to handle everything available, specially with an optimized kernel like siyah. And you are right, the default mode is dynamic hotplug, which use both core when needed and turn the core 1 ( 2nd core ) off when not needed.

I tried playing a little with it. The overall smootness doesn't change and i get about the same fps in nenamark2. The only game i saw stuttering a little more in single mode was Shadowgun, the others are just the same. I also have the feeling that cpu noise is reduced while playing music through headsets when you run on single.

I like the idea of switching off one core. But while using only one core this leads to a higher load on that corse. This will result in higher frequencies an thus higher battery consumption?
So might using only one core even be worse for battery life?
I mean isn't that the reason why you use multiple cores? That one does not have to produce cpu with high frequencies? I think I once read that the energy a cpu uses it proportional to the frequency squared. So it is not a linear relation. That means two cores on 500 MHz are using less power than one cpu on 1000 Mhz. Can someone confirm that? So if th os is optimized for multiple cores the energy consumptions will be less.
What do you think or know about Android. Is it managing two cores intelligently an thus reducing energy consumption or are we doing better with switching off one core?

Hi,
is anybody out there who can share any experiences with this 2nd Core app?
It would be very interesting whether it really saves battery(and if yes, is it noticeably or is it a huge difference)? Are there any negative effects in speed oder stability?
Rgds

I don't particularly care about potential battery saving, but I use it to manually disable one core while playing games which have problems with SoundPool ( see http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=17623 ), such as Galcon, as this mitigates the problems.

Schindler33 said:
I like the idea of switching off one core. But while using only one core this leads to a higher load on that corse. This will result in higher frequencies an thus higher battery consumption?
So might using only one core even be worse for battery life?
I mean isn't that the reason why you use multiple cores? That one does not have to produce cpu with high frequencies? I think I once read that the energy a cpu uses it proportional to the frequency squared. So it is not a linear relation. That means two cores on 500 MHz are using less power than one cpu on 1000 Mhz. Can someone confirm that? So if th os is optimized for multiple cores the energy consumptions will be less.
What do you think or know about Android. Is it managing two cores intelligently an thus reducing energy consumption or are we doing better with switching off one core?
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totlly agree

Overclocking the S4 and throttling

Hi,
I have run into some results from users showing that overclocking is indeed counter productive on the s4 as it would bench lower due to throttling as a result of overheating. Has anyone else actually benefited from overclocking it? If so let's see some screeniez actually proving that it is worth to overclock and at what point the throttling begins to take effect from CPU overheating.

Ward

i had very good resoults but with overclocking gpu not cpu. Everyithing was smoother with overclocking GPU, so i recommended that you overclock GPU and you will get best resoults for daily use. Otherwise overclocking CPU is still good but dont promise any real life perfomance, i have overclocked mine for like 200Mhz along with gpu and get best possible resoult for daily usage. But i can tell you that battery is not happy about this U need powerbank in you pocket to get through day.

Compared to my stock Note 10+, my stock S4+ is so slow it's not even worth comparing.
You only have so much to work with... better architecture, faster chipsets and memory make substantial improvements in the newer platforms even with no overclocking.
At least until Android 10, then things start going to hell... scoped storage sucks.
So far Pie is the Android OS's zenith in my opinion.

CPU Throttling - warranty?

Hello !
After long weeks of searching the answer and solution to my problem, I am exhausted. So I would like to ask the biggest Android community for help
Well, I know it's not new, but I have problem with my S7 Edge (Exynos) performance
I experience FPS drops in almost every game I play. As for games it's not that irritating, but recently I have bought Gear VR and while having this thing so close to your eyes, you see every frame skipping.
Apps for checking the CPU throttling shows that after 5-10 minutes the 4 bigger cores slow down to about 50% of their full speed. It leads to ~30% performance slow down.
I tried every solution that doesn't require root access and warranty void. For example: disabling certain packages and services (Game Launcher, Game optimization service); different settings in Game Tuner; performance mode; factory reset etc. Nothing works.
Does this kind of problems can be repaired on warranty? I know that in order to fix this you can change kernel setting, cpu governor etc but ofc they don't do that in Samsung Service Center. Is it possible for them to replace the main board and cpu with Snapdragon one?
I would not like to root my device because I didn't want to lose my 3 years warranty and I am using a lot of applications that may not work with a root.
Thank you in advance for all your replies

Did you try the game performance mode? As the "performance mode" is just screen resolution and brightness. The game mode is the real performance mode where the temps throttling is relaxed and higher clock speeds allowed(you can also edit the profile to set the resolution manually to wqhd). You can also try to set the resolution to full hd and see how it goes (tho for VR it won't be cool, but for the test it won't hurt). Also if the phone is new, it will need atleast 10 days to settle and become faster, smoother, better. Apply updates if they are pending too.
Otherwise you can't do much without root, but even then you are limited to what you can achieve so be careful + samsung have a fuse into the chip that burns out when you root the phone, it's not possible to hide the intervention and they can deny warranty for that reason (and often do so).

high_voltage said:
Did you try the game performance mode? As the "performance mode" is just screen resolution and brightness. The game mode is the real performance mode where the temps throttling is relaxed and higher clock speeds allowed(you can also edit the profile to set the resolution manually to wqhd). You can also try to set the resolution to full hd and see how it goes (tho for VR it won't be cool, but for the test it won't hurt). Also if the phone is new, it will need atleast 10 days to settle and become faster, smoother, better. Apply updates if they are pending too.
Otherwise you can't do much without root, but even then you are limited to what you can achieve so be careful + samsung have a fuse into the chip that burns out when you root the phone, it's not possible to hide the intervention and they can deny warranty for that reason (and often do so).
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Thank you for your reply
Yes, I've tried "game mode" but there is no difference. Changing resolution to Full HD helps for a while, but the Gear VR software doesn't work properly on anything other than WQHD. It just doesn't scale properly and you are unable to see whole content.
I'm just wondering whether every S7 Edge has problems like mine. I understand throttling after 20-30 minutes of intensive gameplay, but ~40% slow down after 3-5 minutes seems strange, especially because phone doesn't even get warm.

emsitek said:
Thank you for your reply
Yes, I've tried "game mode" but there is no difference. Changing resolution to Full HD helps for a while, but the Gear VR software doesn't work properly on anything other than WQHD. It just doesn't scale properly and you are unable to see whole content.
I'm just wondering whether every S7 Edge has problems like mine. I understand throttling after 20-30 minutes of intensive gameplay, but ~40% slow down after 3-5 minutes seems strange, especially because phone doesn't even get warm.
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Hard to tell, got the phone, but no vr... :/
Otherwise I don't have problems with gaming, the game mode smooths a little the already fluid gaming(but then again, the game I play mostly is vainglory and that game runs great on htc m8 that is almost 4 years old). You are talking about some more massive performance drop. Many phones start to throttle early and throttle hard, samsung is one of them for sure (they want the phone cold).
@hamdir can you lend a hand on that one? You are tons more experience with VR than me.

high_voltage said:
Hard to tell, got the phone, but no vr... :/
Otherwise I don't have problems with gaming, the game mode smooths a little the already fluid gaming(but then again, the game I play mostly is vainglory and that game runs great on htc m8 that is almost 4 years old). You are talking about some more massive performance drop. Many phones start to throttle early and throttle hard, samsung is one of them for sure (they want the phone cold).
@hamdir can you lend a hand on that one? You are tons more experience with VR than me.
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Well, there is an app called CPU Throttling Test on Google Play. I would be really thankful if you give me information how your phone behave in this app. Mine throttles hard after 3-8 minutes. Clock speed of the better cores goes down to about 1.6GHz each. Sometimes even below 1.5GHz.

emsitek said:
Well, there is an app called CPU Throttling Test on Google Play. I would be really thankful if you give me information how your phone behave in this app. Mine throttles hard after 3-8 minutes. Clock speed of the better cores goes down to about 1.6GHz each. Sometimes even below 1.5GHz.
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From a cold phone, 1.9GHz almost right away(I guess the highest freq is only for burst load, like app launching) and kept for 8 minutes then drop to 1.57GHz on the big cores. So I think it's in line with your result.

high_voltage said:
From a cold phone, 1.9GHz almost right away(I guess the highest freq is only for burst load, like app launching) and kept for 8 minutes then drop to 1.57GHz on the big cores. So I think it's in line with your result.
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Yeah, that would be it. Thank you for your time. So it seems to be normal, I hope I'll get used to it somehow
I also wrote an email to Oculus, maybe they heard sth about this issue and know a fix for frames skipping.

The notorious feature known as DVFS is the likely culprit. Some forum members suggest it throttles the GPU and CPU to improve benchmark results or otherwise to protect the device. I've noticed it can lock-up and end up overheating the device but that's just an anecdote.
You can try forcing the app to run at a lower resolution which Samsung's Game Tuner does for some games, or find other solutions for unrooted devices like capping CPU frequency for a smoother experience.

nexidus said:
The notorious feature known as DVFS is the likely culprit. Some forum members suggest it throttles the GPU and CPU to improve benchmark results or otherwise to protect the device. I've noticed it can lock-up and end up overheating the device but that's just an anecdote.
You can try forcing the app to run at a lower resolution which Samsung's Game Tuner does for some games, or find other solutions for unrooted devices like capping CPU frequency for a smoother experience.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Almost all the phones are tweaked to use max freq only on single core load and app startup (burst). If their power management detect heavy load on all cores, it will automatically scale down to lower freq state to prevent heat building up fast. In reality in our case this is 1.87GHz for all big cores + the small ones (higher if only the big cluster is used, leaving the small cores off). The first actual thermal throttling level is 1.56-1.57GHz at around 8 minutes mark. Games would take a lot longer and in my observation as the phone is big and none will use 8 cores at the same time - there will be no throttling, just power management and stable fps. His case is different tho, VR is really a heavy one on the CPU.
As for DVFS (and extended to samsung power management, every manufacturer has it's own management) - it's there for a reason, to use your phone without major slowdowns due to heat and to be cold in touch, i.e. better for use. You can always change the behaviour via custom kernel, but you can't get more performance without heating the phone to the point of hardware throttling or uncomfortable to hold. Actually as you said - the right way if modify is to cap to lower freq and try to command the phone to keep them. This would still lead to a lot of heat, but will take some time to build up (and it will look smoother, tho with lower fps). OC is pointless for speed gains, will work only for burst loads. UV is not effective too as nowdays the SOC's are heavily binned for optimal settings from the factory.

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