18
Can I overclock an android tablet with termux?
(piefed.blahaj.zone)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Usually (on laptops anyway) setting the performance governor only marginally increases throughput and/or latency, while significantly increasing power use. This is because the default behavior of ondemand governor is, almost always, to go to max clock speed practically instantly when there's actual work to do.
In theory it can even have detrimental effect, especially with passive/inadequate cooling (which I assume an Android tablet would have), because the CPU will throttle automatically if it gets too warm, and disabling power saving features means it'll run generally hotter.
Thank you for this insight! Before setting the scaling governor, I did some initial testing that showed exactly what you're saying: whenever I switched windows, fired up another app, wrote to a file - really whatever I tried - the frequencies maxed out. Maybe, what felt marginally snappier was the result of the CPU not having to jump between frequencies? I have zero knowledge on how CPUs work with power... 😅
Yeah could be. There's some latency for sure, the question is whether it's noticeable. Definitely hard to tell subjectively, and as far as I know, also hard to measure without special equipment. I just think it's probably not worth it to use the performance governor, even for (say) a laptop connected to a power supply, just because of the extra heat, fan noise, or the potentially earlier throttling. But I guess you have to judge that for yourself.