Under the hood of OverDrive3
OverDrive 3.0To coincide with the launch of the latest Black Edition, AMD will be delivering a beta version of its system-wide tweaking utility known as OverDrive. The latest version, v3.0, contains two notable new features. The first, dubbed Smart Profiles, works in a generally analogous fashion to Intel's Turbo Boost Technology on the Core i7 chips, where clock-speed can be auto-toggled by the system depending upon per-core load.
Smart Profiles
Only using two cores on a quad-core CPU - gaming, for example - then Smart Profile can boost the clocks to the cores such that the chip remains within the overall thermal envelope. It's a little cleverer than that, taking in custom profiles for set configurations, but that's it in a nutshell.
Note the 3.4GHz clock-speed on two cores and 3.0GHz on the other two?
Black Edition Memory Profiles
BEMP (Black Edition Memory Profiles) is AMD's answer to Intel/NVIDIA's XMP/EPP2.0 memory profiles, where high-speed DDR3's memory's parameters can be auto-set by the application rather than through a labourious trip in the BIOS's sub-screens.
Working on top of the operating system, BEMP requires a system reboot once the pre-programmed latencies/timings have been set. BEMP support extends to auto-toggling the northbridge voltage and frequency, DDR3 frequency (of course) and voltage. Right now, only a handful of modules and boards (790FX) are qualified with BEMP profiles, so it's a case of wait three months and then evaluate AMD's progress in this case.
