It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place - H.L. Mencken
|
|
|
Modder overclocks Motorola Xoom to 1.5GHz
TABLET MANUFACTURER Motorola has been holding back the performance capabilities of its Xoom tablet, as shown by a talented modder who managed to overclock the tablet to 1.5GHz.
Motorola's Xoom tablet is equipped with Nvidia's Tegra 2 dual core chip that plods along at 1GHz. It's not that the chip is particularly slow but a chap at Xda Developers Forum managed to bump up the clock speed by 50 per cent and keep it stable enough to run a suite of benchmarks.
The procedure to overclock a Xoom isn't quite as easy as jumping into the BIOS and fiddling with a couple of settings, however it's far from rocket science. After unlocking the Xoom's bootloader and rooting the device, it's a matter of loading a new boot image with a kernel that supports the higher chip frequencies.
Running the Quadrant benchmark, the 1.5GHz Xoom tablet showed 40 per cent higher performance over a standard Xoom running at 1GHz.
While the modder is claiming that the Xoom runs stable, it's likely that battery life will be significantly reduced by this extra turn of speed. We assume that as the Xoom is able to complete benchmarks, the heat being put out by the Tegra 2 chip isn't making the Xoom too hot to handle.
The ability to overclock the Tegra 2 chip shows that Motorola and Nvidia could bring out devices that use the same chip running at higher frequencies in the future. µ
Share this:
Share
Actually, oveclocking the CPU doesn't have that much impact on battery life - at least not when combined with a CPU profile forcing it to run at lowest speed when the screen is off. The most power hungry part of the phone is without doubt the display.I usually charge my phone every night - although sometimes, it could probably have lasted at least a day longer (with moderate use).
And the battery lasts for?
The Motorola xoom isn't the only overclocked device. My HTC Desire HD currently runs at up to 1.8GHz with no stability issues (custom ROM from XDA forum).
"Motorola has been holding back the performance capabilities of its Xoom tablet"
This statement is completely misleading and uninformed. Engineers, the competent ones at least, always include margins for component tolerances in their designs to ensure sufficiently high production yields. If they were to push the performance of every unit to the maximum, the yields, reliability and profits would plummet and they'd go out of business in short order.