Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Thu 31st Jul 2008 20:51 UTC, submitted by snydeq
While using an AMD Barcelona server to create a portable benchmarking kit, InfoWorld's Tom Yager discovered something unexpected: "I could incur variances in some benchmark tests ranging from 10 to 60 percent through combined manipulation of the server's BIOS settings, BIOS version, compiler flags, and OS release." Yager put this matter to AMD's performance engineers and was told he was seeing an effect widely known among CPU engineers, but seldom communicated to IT - that the performance envelope of a CPU is cast in silicon, but is sculpted in software. "Long before you lay hands on a server," Yager writes, "BIOS and OS engineers have reshaped its finely tuned logic in code, sometimes with the real intent of making it faster [...] sometimes to homogenize the server to flatten its performance relative to Intel's."
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Member since:
2005-07-03
Off Topic, but yes. You can generally (on modern cars) tweak the computers that mix the fuel and manage all the engine parameters. Sometimes you've got small microchips that are "optimized" for a different mixture (therefore extracting more power from the same engine) and sometimes you have to change the entire "computer". You can also (and they do) get into the computer and tweak parameters.
Risk? Well, to put an analogy, it would be like overclocking a computer. Nothing happens... theoretically. But it could overheat, fail, break, blow, etc. You never now.
Difference is: a computer costs <2k. A car >10.000