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allenmaher on 10 May 2013
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BlkPaladin said:
allenmaher said:
I doubt whether the CPU is running faster, the OS is clearly using the CPU much more efficiently now. The days of having a turbo mode on your computer are long over (a button that makes your computer run slower, yes they used to be common). It may be that there is some clocking change that was enabled now that they have improved stability, but I doubt that. The main issues of instability seem to be power related such as when you power your USB drive from the WiiU rather than externally so boosting clock speed and power consumption does not seem likely.

The chip likely has quite a bit of untapped potential, the powerpc architecture is a very decent one and this seems to have more in common with power7 than power6. RISC based processors are better for number crunching than CISC intel based ones. The WiiU has an OS in its infancy, I expect the performance to improve significantly over time especially when they better leverage the GPGPU features.

This is not unusual, I recently updated my laptop from a linux 3.5 kernel to a 3.8 one and saw noticeable speed improvements.

If I remeber correctly the turbo button was only for the 486DX.(The only CISC chip with a clock doubler, I really don't know about the RISC chips at that time. After that it was software controlled.) And the practice of down clocking a CPU is used by both Sony and Nintendo, though for their handhelds. They do that to squeeze a little more battery life out of the handheld at the begining of their life and with updates remove the software limits on the CPU to allow developers to use more of the power, at the cost of the battery life.

And I agree both update are more than likely streamlining the memory management and making some loading processes more transparent. i.e. Allowing the plaza to load and execute while low priorty processes unneeded by the menu finish up. I believe they orginally waited for the software to totally close down before loading the plaza and menu, but by raising the priority of loading the menu and lowering the priority of garbage collection to take better advantage of the OOE CPU it achieved the faster load times. And the next update will further stream line this process and other processes faster.

Though it is possible if the rumor of the 35/45w is true, they did underclock CPU and they removed or in the process of removing the software and allowed the CPU/GPU to use the full power. But you would not see a 300% more like a 20-to-22% increase.


Turbo buttons were common from the time of the V20 (a pre 286 chip) through 286,386 up to the 486.  RISC chips at the time were in the UNIX, VAX workstation and server machines (I spent a lot of time on all of them at the time, PCs were really underpowered compared to them RISC chips have been 64 bit for much longer than x86 the difference now is small and task specific)

I agree that any over clocking would not bring about a 300% improvement in an out of order instruction chip it is not a brute force architecture.  And in no case would you want to push the system close to the 45W supply limit, remember periferals are drawing that down as well.  When the system is running at max you want at least 5 watts of spare power to accomodate fluctuations in power supply.