Shenanigans and Shiny Things

There are shenanigans afoot in the computing world ...

Also shiny things in the sky :

What's the shenaniganning ?

Turns out that some of the manufacturers of motherboards have figured out a way to trick the system in order to allow more wigglyamps to be shoved into processors in order to make them go faster. Beware both the reporting and the conclusions from it ... The theory is that if the software in the motherboard reports one number and that number is too low, the software that governs automatic overclocking goes : I can drive this processor harder !

For this exploit, it's the numbers that do voltage and current. The processor should only be given up to a certain limit there, any higher will make it go too hot ... causing its life to be shortened. I quite liked getting 8 years out of my last processor !

Here's numbers from my machine from just now. The science sums are turned off, so the numbers are for low activity :

(You may need to click for bigger ...)

The crudely drawn arrow points to the suspect line ... Apparently my machine is reporting that the processor is taking about half the power that it is actually taking. (the electrical input power will turn into heat and the heat has to be taken away - too much heat = crash and boom).

I think the sum is coming from the "Core + SoC Power" and "Core PPT" (Package Power Tracking). However, when I read the HWInfo page saying what the Power Reporting Deviation meant, there wasn't enough there to say where it was coming from. Which makes me question its value and relevance.

The other terms there are "Core" - this is the bit that carries out the instructions. There are 6 of these on my processor. "SoC" is System on Chip, it's the bit that connects the cores to the rest of the system. Gotta get the data in to them and the data out of them. This allows the instructions to tell the rest of the system what to do (changing the picture in the graphics card) and allows it to tell the memory and drives to feed it more data.

What do I think this actually means ? Not actually very much unless you trust your system to automatically overclock itself, as processors will do these days. I don't believe in doing that, the automatic overclocking measures are usually intended for when the system isn't doing very much (i.e. marketing numbers) and are meaningless when you're running tasks on all cores, like I do with the BOINC Science Sums.

The more important numbers are the ones for temperature ... and whether the system crashes or not. The computer will crash when either the temperature goes too high and the electronics can't work thermally or when the signals are coming at it too fast and the switching isn't fast enough. Processors are filled with transistors, which are tiny little switches. You can make them switch faster if you brute force more electrons through them.

Oh - I may have almost broken something yesterday evening as well ... I was seeing if I could get more information out of the AMD Ryzen Master program and pressed one too many buttons ...

My processor usually runs at around 50 degrees C on idle. It'll go up to between 70 and 80 degrees C when it's doing science sums (depends on ambient conditions too). I should probably actually fit the aftermarket cooler I have at some point but I'm happy with what the stock Wraith Stealth cooler does.

After clicking a button last night, while it was doing sums, the chip overclocked itself to 1.4V, 4.2GHz ... and the temperatures shot up to 95 degrees C. Oops. And it didn't crash ! I think I may have a pretty good cpu there if it survived that without crashing or other ill effects. It's back down to the normal speeds of 1.1V, 3.6GHz.

The thing that matters with the overclocking is the temperature and whether the machine crashes or not. I'm taking a very dim view of my motherboard maker (who I won't be recommending any more) using this software fiddle but I don't think it actually means very much, unless you trust the automatic overclocking features ... which you should never, ever use. It's not worth it for small, inconsistent gains that shorten the life of the machine.

To the Shiny Things !

Tried putting the kettle on these geysers. The temperature was good but the lack of atmosphere makes the water boil off before the tea brews. There's probably a way around that.

And a higher shot. I made a little error here because in chasing the geological geyser formation, the nebula ended up a bit too high. (If you drive the camera drone thing below the surface, it blacks out the screen)

I did a bit more neutron star boosting along the way, this is the Tea and Medals about to dive in to that jet cone in order to get a boost.

More nebulae :-).

A planetary nebula poking out from behind a gas giant.

 

I did like this one, it's where I stopped on Thursday evening. Good shadows, an eclipse on the gas giant and it looks like they've added in some fogging too over there in the distance.

The nest stop was the Perimeter Nebula.

Today''s travels included the Perimeter Nebula.

Before heading off to the Damselfly nebula. Pretty and blue. The picture at the start of the post was taken at the neutron star inside that nebula.

The last place to visit today was the Child of Time nebula inside the Cloomeia sector. This one is another planetary nebula with ...

Black hole ! This one is a tiddler black hole at just 3 solar masses. The game lets you get right up close, with this one being taken at 25km away. I'll have a natter about spaghettification some time ...

There are benign black holes and rather more malicious black holes. It depends on high big the black hole is, with the smaller ones giving worse spaghettification effects than the big ones. What is spaghettification ? It's a difference in the force between the end of an objects that close to the black hole and the force at the end. When we stand up, there is a tiny difference in the gravity exerts on our toes and our head but it's so small that it doesn't matter. But if you're close enough to a black hole, there starts being a massive difference between the gravity exerted between close and far ... and the object rips apart due to differences in its weight. (Weight = Mass x Gravity with weight being a force)

I'll probably go into that more at a later date when my brain is up to doing the numbers on it. Brain is still not quite where it should be !

Oh and I'm still loving the effects of what happens when you fly away from the black holes. The minimum speed with the hyperdrive on is 30km/s, which lets the lensing effect unfold in a rather pretty way.

Stopping point for the night - nice bit of sun there.

Last one, looking back at the companion star and the black hole will be up in the sky there. Not sure where :-)

That's it for me for tonight !

Stay safe, be well.