[Windows Mobile Development and Hacking General] AgentSmith:
Oliy, first of all, thanks a lot for all your effort here. This program really does magic on my HTC Wizard (with Molski's 2.26 ROM). Hopefully you will find the time to improve omapscaler because I have a feature request that could be quite useful. Currently the program overclocks and underclocks the cpu at frequent moments in time. Ideally the clockspeed would be adjusted continuously instead of every x seconds providing the needed increase in cpu power instantaneously, just as modern Athlon64 cpu's are capable of. Since pda's obviously aren't built for that we have to look for an alternative.

In most situations an overclock is more critical than an underclock as it means the cpu has to deliver more power than it is currently capable of. This means that it has to overclock with as little delay as possible. But in certain situations the increased demand on the cpu fluctuates a lot. In such cases you might want to prevent the cpu from clocking down too quickly since a temporarily decreased cpu speed will inevitably be insufficient the next moment and because, well, an omap processor simply isn't as responsive as an Athlon64 cpu when it comes to increasing the speed. And a sudden lack of cpu power obviously makes a program (which may be anything from browsing larger xhtml pages to playing video or games) start to stutter.

Therefor it might be a good idea to prevent needless slow jumps in speed by introducing an underclock delay. Clockspeed should be increased as quickly as possible when needed, but a decrease should take at least say a minute (but this could as well be configured by the user). This way the cpu can still handle any unexpectedly increased demands fairly well and it will do perfect when another peak in cpu demand occurs within the next minute or so. If no such peaks reoccur the cpu speed decreases to a lower level where it waits for another minute before falling back to the next level until finally getting to its lowest underclock speed. I think this underclock delay won't eat a significant amount of battery time, however it will make the pda operate a lot smoother in periods of 'bumpy' cpu load.

About the disappointing powersaving results: I think I have an explanation. Isn't a cpu's power consumption more influenced by its core voltage than by its clock speed? Athlon64's save power at lower speed mainly due to their decreased Vcore. So I think that as long as we don't find a way to achieve the same thing with omap processors we won't be very succesful at making our pda's last much longer. But I'm afraid it is simply impossible. Maybe we all simply want an xscale processor in our next pda or smartphone! :roll:

Something else. I often listen to music using my A2DP cordless headset and TCPMP. I always put my Wizard in standby, because the music simply continues to play that way while conserving as much battery as possible. Of course the pda doesn't have to stay in highest overclock speed that way. Therefor my question is: how does omapscaler behave when the device is put into standby when the cpu happens to be at highest speed? If it simply stays in high speed it would eat away more battery than needed, if the cpu simply reverts to standard speed that would be ok, if omapscaler continues to operate that would be even better. So please tell me: which is it? :)