Perhaps that generation of cpus was very insufficiently cooled? This is before people even really put much of a heat sink on a cpu. The code did run faster with ice water, and faster again with liquid nitrogen. It was a high school, county-level science fair. I don’t know how things stand today, but at the time “will a computer run faster with better cooling?” was a perfectly acceptable level of scientific inquiry for a 14 year old.
I’m truly sorry if my childhood anecdote has inadvertently spread misinformation on this topic :)
> Perhaps that generation of cpus was very insufficiently cooled? This is before people even really put much of a heat sink on a cpu.
The 286 came out in 1982 but it wasn't until ~2000 (with the release of the Pentium 4) that thermal throttling was introduced.
From ~1995-2000 if the CPU got over temperature, your PC just turned off immediately. And prior to ~1995 if you ran a CPU without a heatsink it could overheat and destroy itself. We just had to be careful not to do that :)
the singular form of evidence is not anecdote. I think it's an interesting conundrum myself. as others have pointed out, the story as it was told is not consistent with the physics and current knowledge of what things were like in those days: CPUs did not yet do thermal throttling and simply cooling a CPU from that time doesn't make it go faster.
somebody else mentioned the possibility that the cooling did something to the crystal oscillator, but I think there are another two explanations that either alone or in combination might explain what happened: unreliable narrator (OP was very young when the memory was formed) and external influence - his dad or teacher might have done the overclocking which might have been beyond his understanding and therefore notice at the time.
either way there's no reason to take anecdotes uncritically.
That’s right. Did somebody investigate the same thing and had different results? Because in this thread there are only theoretical explanations why it cannot be, and not experiments. So in short, there is only one data point.
What conclusions do you believe it is reasonable to draw in light of this? Is your position significantly different from what I said:
> either way there's no reason to take anecdotes uncritically.
> Because in this thread there are only theoretical explanations why it cannot be
No, the explanations are referring to the mountain of evidence based on the physics of the chips and the known characteristics of the chips of the time. That's not theoretical, that past observations.
I’m truly sorry if my childhood anecdote has inadvertently spread misinformation on this topic :)