At a large enough N 5% to 10% is massive, at a small enough N 5% to 10% gets you closer to competitive, somewhere between though is where those extra percentage

At a large enough N 5% to 10% is massive, at a small enough N 5% to 10% gets you closer to competitive, somewhere between though is where those extra percentage points are "meh". For instance I run my computing on a TR 1950X and I could probably undervolt or overclock the chip but, to be honest, it's not worth the perceived "risk". Undervolting could break specific instructions in undetectable ways and the only way to be sure things haven't broken would be to run something like sandsifter [0] multiple times. Because I, and many others who would have the technical know how, write software on these systems it's not very much worth the headache. If I had a seperate system I built just for gaming or doing a specific task and I wanted to reduce how much I spent, or the power usage, etc undervolting would then shift out of headache -> super worth it. The last thing I want to have to do is run every piece of code I need through godbolt and pray there's no AVX instructions that "may" be fishy. I think this is largely why cloud providers don't do things like this as aggressively. They do it to some extent with custom off-roadmap chips but not controlled dynamically in userspace. If we can get something like this original post into the kernel that would be a massive win for everyone. [0] - https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sandsifter https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sandsifter