drkohler said:
In simple terms, if you want higher speeds, you need to provide more current per time unit to the transistors. Simplified, you want 6% higher speed, you need 6% more current (which is done by increasing the driving force, the voltage). Now if you looked into your old physics book, you would find that the heat to dissipate over your resistors goes like P = I^2 * R. So contrary of what you think, heat dissipation "goes worse" with clock rate increase. AMD stuff had a tendency to go through the roof rather early (compared to Intel chips) at some clock rate. This was improved and AMD can go around 1GHz without excessive heat production. Again the key word here is "excessive" (check a 7970 for heat dissipation), the 53MHz clock rate increase does increase the heat output noticably. The second misconception is the assumption that "larger box = better cooling". This is wrong, as larger volume always means "possibility to have dead air space". So it is actually more difficult to cool stuff in a large box than to cool the same stuff in a small box (if done correctly). What always wins is good airflow within your box, irregardless of size. With "simple" consoles like XBox One/PS4 (it basically has only one major, but very localized, heat source, the APU), so designing a reasonable cooling system wasn't that difficult for either company. MS chose to go large box because it wants it to look like a cool Hifi component, and could then incorporate a "huge" fan as a freebie, pretty much noiseless until your game goes into overdrive.. I wonder who figured out the 853MHz, though. Why that odd number? Or maybe the guy who posted it simply mistook an engineering test ("we could run the APU consistent at 853MHz" in the lab) as a sign that end user consoles run at 853MHz? Notice that for a company that told everyone who wanted (or not wanted) to hear that "it is not about the specs, it is all about the software", it is rather strange that they are fiddling with exactly those specs so late in the development cycle. Actually, we might already in the production phase so I wonder who made the long term test with increased clock rates... |
To be honest, its more the general public that is making a big deal from a off hand comment. Reading the quote, Marc was just mentioned the bump as showing how going from design to production things have worked out better for the X1 tech and they were able to improve things with the system in general. Next thing you know, that comment is headline news with sites Stating "Xbox increase GPU output by 6.6 %" etc. Its probably whats wrong with the world where every little comment is made into some big announcement.
