[Galaxy 3 Android Development] hillbeast:
This is a message from a developer who is in a team who develops a kernel with a very large overclock. Do not take this is an idiot babbling, read this and take it to heart as this is very important.

I want to talk to you about overclocking our phone and how dangerous it can actually be. I love overclocking, and have overclocked my main computer, and I overclock my phone, but my overclock (as you can see from my signature) is very mild. A simple 800MHz overclock.

When we first got overclocking on our phone (thanks to Fugumod), we were around 800MHzish and it gave a nice boost. It got up to 1GHz and it gave another good boost. Over time, we have discovered the phone works at high speeds, now 1366 in Fugumod, and 1400 in G3MOD. Now if you look at these speeds and compare it to the original clock speed on our phone (667MHz, or you can look at the Spica which has the same CPU but with a larger transistor process: 800MHz), this is a 204% overclock on Fugumod and 209% on G3MOD.

Now let's put these percentages into perspective: on your desktop computer, a 200% overclock is normally only possible with serious cooling: water or liquid nitrogen, and we are attempting to do this in a PHONE with NO cooling, and NO ventilation. Furrthermore, it is kept in our pockets beside our thigh muscle: the largest muscle in our body and it emits a large amount of heat. These are not ideal conditions for a CPU to be kept in, especially when it is in a fragile state such as overclocking. We are lucky however because phones have clock governors which clock it back when it is idling to conserve power.

When you overclock the CPU, you must also overvolt it to keep the system stable while overclocked. However the downside is that if you overvolt your CPU, you will use more power, and also reduce the lifespan of our CPU. Let me show you how much more power is required to run the phone at 1.4GHz.

Now, as we don't know the exact power consumption of our CPU, I will assume the power consumption is 100mW. In overclocking a desktop computer, we use this algorithm:

OC Wattage = TDP * ( OC MHz / Stock MHz) * ( OC Vcore / Stock Vcore )^2

So that means 100 * (1400 / 667) * (1525 / 1200) ^ 2 = 338mW. That is over 3 times the power consumption of the CPU at stock speeds. That also in turn effects the lifespan of the CPU as the transistors are both having to work twice as hard (as the CPU clock is twice as high) and are drawing three times the power consumption, this means the CPU will last 6 times less at 1400MHz.

When we were starting out with overclocking our phones, we didn't have a lot of the nice new features we have discovered that boost performance but now that we do, these huge overclocks just aren't as necessary anymore.

TL;DR

Guys, our phone can go at 1.4GHz or 1.36GHz, yes. But is it a good idea to keep it at those sorts of speeds? No. The reason marcellusbe and the G3MOD team provide such HUGE overclocks are for rare occasions. When the phone is just doing nothing, we expect you to put it back to 667/800MHz, but when you are wanting to play Angry Birds or emulate Castlevania 4 or something, you put it up to 1400MHz, but put it back again once you are done. 24/7 usage at 1400MHz or 1366MHz is DESTROYING your CPU and your battery.

USE OVERCLOCKING WITH EXTREME CAUTION

Extra Information

Here is a graph to show the power consumption increase from running the CPU at higher overclocks and also the reduction from undervolting.