Is there anyway to overclock or improve the performance of Clovetrail Atom Z2640?

[AndroAsc]

I'm using a Clovetrail Atom Windows 8 tablet, and the performance leaves much to be desired. Personally, I would be OK with sacrificing some of the insane 10+ hr battery life for more juice. Core i is not an option for me, because the 5ish battery life is not good enough.

The CPU seems to downclock to 800Mhz when idle and only ramps up to 1.8Ghz under load. Is there anyway to overclock the Clovetrail Atom SoC? Or is it even possible to set the clock speed at 1.8Ghz permanently, so that the device would be snappier?

Windows 7 used to have the option under power settings to configure the min clock speed, but that option has been removed in Windows 8. I tried the command line version, but it did not seem to affect the clock speed behavior at all...

 

[Exophase]

Why would you want it at 1.8GHz when it isn't under load? Is it taking too long to switch? That really shouldn't be the case..

I'd be surprised if overclocking is possible.. I'd also advise against it if it is, tablets have very tight thermal/power designs that may not like being exceeded.

 

[sm625]

Even if it was at 3GHz, there are some things it is just going to be painfully slow at. It is and has always been a very laggy, spotty processor. It has many cache misses and is constantly flushing the cache.

 

[AndroAsc]

Why would you want it at 1.8GHz when it isn't under load? Is it taking too long to switch? That really shouldn't be the case..

I'd be surprised if overclocking is possible.. I'd also advise against it if it is, tablets have very tight thermal/power designs that may not like being exceeded.

I wanted to see if cutting down the switch time will help reduce the lag.

And even at full load, the tablet does not heat up. So, I'm convinced that higher burstable speeds like 2.4GHz may be possible. I just need high CPU speed for less than a minute, it's not as if I'm running Prime95 on it...

 

[dave_the_nerd]

(Well... probably not, anyway. It's an x86 machine - does the tablet have anything analogous to a BIOS or UEFI? You could at least bump the bclock and turn off power-saving features, to see if that helps. Afaik, Atom doesn't support multiplier adjustments like a -K CPU would.)

Maybe this will give you a few ideas:

http://lifehacker.com/5842094/speed-up-your-low+powered-pc-or-netbook-by-overclocking

 

[Exophase]

I wanted to see if cutting down the switch time will help reduce the lag.

Unless you're actually monitoring clock speeds while you're doing things you can't tell if your performance problems are due to the clock not being at max fast enough. No reason to assume this. Intel's processors are pretty good at ramping up.

And even at full load, the tablet does not heat up. So, I'm convinced that higher burstable speeds like 2.4GHz may be possible. I just need high CPU speed for less than a minute, it's not as if I'm running Prime95 on it...

You can't assume anything about how much thermal headroom there is just because it doesn't get hot, much less can you extrapolate anything about how much mre clock speed that could give you. The SoC may be using < 2W right now, but could need over 6W to hit 2.4GHz for all you know. Look at how the TDP increases in Cedar Trail, which uses the same Saltwell core:

http://www.windowsfordevices.com/images/stories/intel_cedartrailspeeds.jpg

 

[podspi]

In my experience, most of the laggy performance from clovertrail is due to the emmc. Overlooking sadly won't do much about that.

What exactly are you having issues with? Making sure the machine isn't swapping makes a huge difference.

 

[datobin1]

Have you tried changing the power setting from balanced to performance? That should set it to its max speed.

 

[pyjujiop]

So, I'm convinced that higher burstable speeds like 2.4GHz may be possible. I just need high CPU speed for less than a minute, it's not as if I'm running Prime95 on it...

If Intel thought that it was capable of 2.4, they would have spec'd it for that speed. Or it might be able to get there, but require so much power that even in bursts, it would kill battery life.

 

[Yuriman]

I've done extensive testing with overclocking and different governors in my Galaxy S2, and in the case of this particular chip, switching to a more aggressive governor does in fact improve "responsiveness" a lot.

I can't say how you'd accomplish overclocking or changing governors (or their equivalent) on your Atom tablet.

 

[IntelUser2000]

It doesn't look like Clover Trail devices have the ability to even change power settings. On the Asus VivoTab Smart, it only has the option for Balanced, and nothing likes of setting even CPU percentages.

Even if you could disable some power features, you'd probably lose the ability of having 10 hours of battery life and go back to 5-6 hours. Then it'd be an exercise in futility because you could just have bought a Core device instead. The power settings being locked down is probably one way to ensure that devices do power down as they should. I think another description for being "open" and "configurable" is "unoptimized".

It isn't by coincidence that Clover Trail devices use things like eMMC for storage rather than more flexible SATA. If it did have an option for SATA, you'd probably lose most of the power advantages by that single device alone.