Did I just overclocked my apu2c4 (AMD GX-412TC SOC)?
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After few days of tests I came to the conclusion that it is still running at 1GHz.
Despite dev.cpu reports supported CPU speeds of 1.4/1.2/1.0GHz, the CPU still runs at 0.6/0.8/1.0GHz.
From my understanding hwpstate sets the P-state by ID via MSR, at OS level ID P-state 0 correspond to 1.4GHz, while at CPU level is 1.0GHz. So communications are by IDs, and in fact, now, I can clearly see frequencies running at 600/800/1000MHz despite sysctl reporting 1.0/1.2/1.4GHz.
A comment in cpuspeed manual says the CPU frequency cannot be changed if TSC is used as Clock, as a matter of fact it uses TSC (1000 quality) and I will try using HPET (950 confidence) and report later.
That would explain temperature not raising, and in fact I was very, very, surprised by this and as a consequence I started investigating.
@Qinn I went to mainline because after few hours of activity, or if using powerd after an high load event, the box started to be slightly sluggish and slower, was just an impression.
Today I can clearly see the CPU stuck at 600MHz after few hours of activity, or if using powerd even while there it was high load the frequency was suddenly dropped and nothing would bring frequency up again apart a reboot. I've tried cooling, waiting, sysctl, ACAD 0x01 to acpi_ac and anything I could come up with.I now believe this was also happening on legacy, making the box slower, justifying my suspects. If so it wasn't a firmware issue, otherwise it's a cpufreq driver issue or a combination between both.
The way I can now clearly see the running frequency is only by using turbostat, under Bzy_MHz column.
pkg add http://pkg0.isc.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:11:amd64/latest/All/turbostat-4.17_1.txz rehash turbostat --interval 3 Core CPU Avg_MHz Busy% Bzy_MHz TSC_MHz IRQ - - 599 100.00 599 998 0 0 0 599 100.00 599 998 0 1 1 599 100.00 599 998 0 2 2 599 100.00 599 998 0 3 3 599 100.00 599 998 0 -
@marcop Its very disturbing that such a simple thing, as "how much is the damn clockrate of a well-known and aging SoC really is", that cannot be reliably and easily figured out! AMD is keeping the authentic tech docs in secret? (as a quick googling around, there seems to be no technical sheet with credible information about this SoC anywhere on the internet).
Vendors who sell the 412TC clocked @ 1 Ghz instead of 1.2 or 1.4 Ghz are selling semi-defect junk purchased cheap from AMD, or there is something going behind the scenes?
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@soder I have no idea, but I guess is due to thermal issues.
It is sold as fanless, there are no alternatives for active or passive heatsink so I'm positive is to protect the CPU from overheating as in fact temp is generally on the high side already.
These docs aren't that secret, vendors and such can have it.
I did however recently made my own alpha-cooling-option (rough and slightly sharp edges still) and temperature is stable between 52 and 58 degrees Celsius, over 10 degrees cooler and there is room to improve.
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@marcop Nice job on that!
On the other hand, quote from the only available document, that I found for this Soc:https://www.amd.com/Documents/AMDGSeriesSOCProductBrief.pdf
"AMD G-Series SOC enables fan-less design that further helps drive down system cost and enhance system reliability by eliminating moving parts"
--> GX-412TC is the lowest clock-rate member of the family, its TDP is only 6W (if that value in the document is reliable at all!). If the slowest chip cannot survive passive-cooled usage, the whole sentence is a pure lie. So Pcengines or any other vendor shouldn't have downclocked the CPU in order to prevent it from melting.
When did technical sheets of this AMD CPU became trade secret, only available to contracted partners, and not available publically to the internet?
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@soder I would love to sometimes have good answers, but as for now doubts can only grow... would this be also why these boards ship with ECC RAM but it isn't enabled? All this does really grow the idea of hiding not one, but many issues.
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@marcop the ECC support is not an open topic since 1,5 years one of the core team members openly admitted they failed to support ECC. Since then they removed all the tracks of the acronym "ECC" from all of their products pages / documentation
http://www.pcengines.info/forums/?page=post&id=E35B5D34-262B-480E-9887-F7F2A292E02F&fid=DF5ACB70-99C4-4C61-AFA6-4C0E0DB05B2A
"In case of ECC this is not easy topic. Number of registers that have to be set correctly and verification procedure requires quite a lot of resources. It is still on my todo list and will try to address it in coming months. I think good approach would be toenable that in memtest86+, but our main concern is that we would like put as little as possible into 4.0.x and move to mainline and release more in 4.5.x."
another forum member wrote:
"So the thing is, official firmware for apu2c4 does enable ECC as part of the DRAM controller initialisation routines that AMD has developed and released in binary form only. However, since AMD does not provide tools for the production line to validate their ECC implementation, by the use of error injections for example, it was decided to no longer market apu2c4 product with ECC support, even when the feature is present and enabled there. Apparently the possibility of using linux kernel edac modules and EDAC_AMD64_ERROR_INJECTION has been overlooked." -
@marcop By the way, this should be an authentic page:
https://www.amd.com/en/products/specifications/embedded/
-> they say here, that base freq. is 1,0Ghz, and Turbo is 1,4Ghz. So if AMD didnt screw up the listing on this page, the CPU base clockrate is 1Ghz, and it should do Turbo. But most probably the BIOS was not prepared to handle this correctly. Or AMD is simply lying.. Or something like that...
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@soder thanks for the ECC update!
About the CPU, I did read the same doc a while ago but I've never found nor another doc confirming this nor a CPU shipped with the advertised spec, how weird.
Going back to what what I believe more important now is to make any of you aware that coreboot v4.8.x has issues with the frequency, after just few minutes of runtime it get stuck at 600MHz: https://github.com/pcengines/coreboot/issues/196
If any of you who have upgraded to v4.8 got the feeling to have a slower system that is the reason. I've personally downgraded to legacy by using a PC Engines SPI.1A and if you have a foolproof way to dimostrate the lower frequency (read the entire report first), please share it in the existing bug report.
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@marcop said in Did I just overclocked my apu2c4 (AMD GX-412TC SOC)?:
@soder thanks for the ECC update!
About the CPU, I did read the same doc a while ago but I've never found nor another doc confirming this nor a CPU shipped with the advertised spec, how weird.
Going back to what what I believe more important now is to make any of you aware that coreboot v4.8.x has issues with the frequency, after just few minutes of runtime it get stuck at 600MHz: https://github.com/pcengines/coreboot/issues/196
If any of you who have upgraded to v4.8 got the feeling to have a slower system that is the reason. I've personally downgraded to legacy by using a PC Engines SPI.1A and if you have a foolproof way to dimostrate the lower frequency (read the entire report first), please share it in the existing bug report.
What legacy bios version are you on now? As I am still on 4.0.7
https://pcengines.github.io/
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@qinn 4.0.18
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Thanks for your quick reply, I will give it a try!
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@soder ECC is now enabled https://pcengines.github.io/#mr-15
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Not supposed to resurrect this post but pcengines had just enabled AMD Core Performance Boot feature:
https://3mdeb.com/firmware/amd-cpu-boost/
Anyone fancy trying out?
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@wgentine said in Did I just overclocked my apu2c4 (AMD GX-412TC SOC)?:
Not supposed to resurrect this post but pcengines had just enabled AMD Core Performance Boot feature:
https://3mdeb.com/firmware/amd-cpu-boost/
Anyone fancy trying out?
Thanks for the link, I can't compare as I don't have a test setup at the moment. I am running v4.9.02 (switched from legacy to main bios version) for more than 2 weeks now and I noticed a drop of more than 10% in the temp, should indicate something.
This post is a bit old so maybe take a look here https://forum.netgate.com/topic/95148/pc-engines-apu2-experiences/218
