[Samsung Infuse 4G] Dani897:
uhh well.... yea and no. there are a few things you need to understand about microprocessors. no two are alike. they are built on a scale of a few nanometers and any difference causes a significant difference. to keep production numbers up there is a line they have to draw between performance potential and stability. more chips will be stable at lower clocks so they pick an speed they can get a high production number out of. sometimes a whole line of chips is produced with exactly the same core. chips that pass the highest get boxed as the highest performing and priced. chips that dont pass will either have specific features turned off, cores turned off or be underclocked and sold as lower models. in addition to that the top performing models are actually over priced, and often many more pass the tests than they need so perfectly good processors are intentionally disabled to fill the market for lower speed processors, so yes the cpu may be "underclocked" in a sense. but i don't know if that really applies to the infuse because i don't know if there are any chips in the same family that have a higher rated clock speed, if there are they aren't used in phones.

in example, on my pc i have a 3 core processor, it's actually a 4 core and i can even turn the 4th core on in bios, but a certain percentage of that particular model of chip will be unstable with the 4th core active.

another thing to understand is how the clock speed is set. there is a buss and a table of multipliers and dividers. so as one part of the chip oscillates at one frequency the multipliers and dividers say how may times per oscillation the other components go. the cpu speed changes by changing these multiplier values. the problem is that there are only so many multipliers the cpu is designed to use. this is a hardware limitation and can't be overcome so at some point the only way to get more clock speed is to change the buss speed which affects the entire system and will cause instability in most cases. occasionally you can get around this if you change the multiplier values for other componants as well but it's probably not a good idea to mess with it. the hummingbird chip only has multipliers to go to 1600mhz regardless of stability unless you mess with the buss, one developer got the galaxy s to 1700 with buss overclocking but some things didn't really work at that speed and it took a lot of changes to other system clocks. snapdragon chips can go to higher clocks and process numbers better but the hummingbird is better for graphics and multimedia which is more important on a modern phone imho.

so yeah 1600 is it, as far as practicality goes anyway. there are a few infuses that can only go to 1400-1500 as well and galaxy s phones which have the same clock limitations but are only rates for 1000mhz rarely go to 1600, but a few do, my captivate was absolutely peaked out at 1300, believe me i tried to get it higher, i tried a lot of things with voltages to try to get it stable, but even 1300 took some doing. it took a long time before developers even produced a kernel for the sgs that used clocks over 1200 because many of the early builds of the sgs series were much like mine and were not stable at high speeds.