Underclocking and overclocking

First thing i've got to say about overclocking a CPU is an effective way of increasing your speed of your device, that can vary from a desktop computer to your laptop and even your smartphone/tablet.

Whenever you buy a laptop, one of the first things you do is check the CPU and it's speed. The normal CPU clock speed in modern laptop is about 2.4ghz and depending on how many cores you have available is a way of detemining on how fast your computer will be.

If your computer running on a 2.4ghz dual core processor, you've got 4.8ghz at your disposal. as we've seen with the Tegra 3 chip set, you've got a quad-core chip with an extra core. 4 cores are running at 1.4ghz and then you've got the companion core running at 1.2ghz. The companion core runs all the background processes and the small powered apps. Having a companion core dramatic ally saves an incredible amount of battery life because it's not powering up all the other cores just to run the device.

Some of you might know that the clock speed of the iPhone is running at a lower clock speed than it's capable of. The iPhone 3GS has a 800mhz processor but apple have designed it and altered the CPU to run at a lower clock speed so that it saves on battery life. So apps could be opening and running faster to the speed of the chip that it has inside it. This happens for all the other iPhones, they all get the same treatment of being underclocked.

This is where it's different in android phones, Android phones aren't underclocked and they aren't overclocked either, they are the speed of the chip that it's inside it.

You can always get third party apps that assist you in altering the clock speed of the CPU to a clock speed that's more suited to you. you can get third party apps on roughly every platform, including webos... which we all know is a dead platform and even that got a clockspeed program called Govnah.

There's a few advantages and disadvantages to changing your clockspeed. First of all the one advantage is a faster device, it might not be the greatest difference but you'll definilty see the difference but there's a major disadvantage and that's battery life. say if you've got a desktop computer, the battery life doesn't matter because you've got no battery life but if you're talking about a portable device like a laptop or a smartphone, the battery life will dramatically go down. And that's not the only disadvantage there's also a risk of overheating and melting the motherboard.

Underclocking your CPU on the device will do the opposite effect, there's a slight slow down of the device but you'll see a big difference in battery life and this is why Apple decides to underclock their devices.

I've got many things more to talk about Underclocking and overclocking but i'll do that in another blog.