Talk:Dynamic frequency scaling

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Merger proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

The result was merge into Dynamic frequency scaling

CPU throttling seems to be the same thing. Suggest it be merged into dynamic frequency scaling. Would flesh this page out with links to some examples, and improve that by giving the theory. Zodon (talk) 01:05, 17 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it's the same concept, but this (Dynamic frequency scaling) is the correct name and that one is not. Raul654 (talk) 01:51, 17 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Re: Proposed merger from voltage and frequency scaling

I think the merger should go the other way. Rather than having small articles on Frequency scaling, Dynamic Frequency scaling and Voltage scaling, seems clearer to merge them all into one article that covers Frequency and voltage scaling, both dynamic and static. Which would contain merger of the aforementioned articles.

) There is considerable overlap in content between the Dynamic voltage scaling and dynamic frequency scaling articles. (Both use the same equation, etc.).
) Frequency and voltage scaling interact - frequently change both at once, rather than just one or just the other.
) At present, the interaction between voltage and frequency scaling is not well covered, it would be nice to have better coverage of that. If they are kept separate then the problem becomes where to put the interaction.
) It isn't clear that there is enough else to be said about each topic to grow the separate articles into more fully fleshed article. (But I am not a hardware guru, so willing to be persuaded otherwise.)

I concur that there are too many articles on this subject, but think that one article could reasonably cover all of these topics: Voltage and frequency scaling, Frequency scaling, Dynamic frequency scaling, Dynamic voltage scaling, and undervolting and overvolting (parts of voltage scaling). As far as I can tell the reasonable place to put such an article would seem to be Frequency and voltage scaling.

Other related articles:

Underclocking is logically part of frequency scaling, status is debatable, could be left separate, could be merged.
Overclocking again, logically part of frequency scaling, but is a large enough article to stand on its own.
Power management - related, but also laps over into ACPI, hibernation, etc.
Low-power electronics - covers other aspects beyond voltage and frequency.

Those are some of my thoughts on the merge, interested to hear other perspectives. Thanks. Zodon (talk) 02:30, 28 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Frequency scaling and dynamic frequency scaling are two very different beasts. The former is a technique used to increase performance in next-generation processors, the latter is a power conservation technique. Ditto voltage scaling, which (while done for the same purpose as dynamic frequency scaling) does so in very different ways. Beyond that, however, none of those other articles should exist except arguably overclocking, which is (IMO) well known and distinct enough from dynamic frequency scaling to merit its own article. (Also, overvolting, I think, should redirect to overclocking.) Raul654 (talk) 06:59, 28 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with this sentiment; DVS and DFS are usually considered together by today's microprocessor designers as the one naturally leads to the other (scale the voltage down and the maximum operating frequency lowers; scale the frequency down and you can lower the voltage), leading to even greater power reduction. So a single DVFS article makes more sense. I would also agree that "overclocking" and "overvolting" are a different thing, although clearly the theory behind "overvolting" comes from the same basic science. Ptoboley (talk) 09:25, 2 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Voltage scaling is always done with frequency scaling, and frequency scaling is almost always done with voltage scaling. In the VLSI research community they are considered a single technique. Quanticles (talk) 19:38, 20 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Other reasons to throttle back

The article fails to mention that there are other reasons why you'd want to throttle back CPU performance. Sometimes older software (e.g. 3D games) won't run properly unless the CPU is throttled. I remember Unreal (released in 1998) having a lot of weird issues when played on my AMD Phenom II X4 965 on Linux via WINE when it was running at the stock 3.4GHz, but ran normally after I throttled it back to 800MHz. I'm going to post this both here and in the underclocking article.