As a teenager in 2005/ 2006, had an obsession with overclocking AMD Opteron 165's. DFI motherboards allowed you to set the ratios for FSB/HTT, LDT/FSB, CPU/FSB,

As a teenager in 2005/ 2006, had an obsession with overclocking AMD Opteron 165's. DFI motherboards allowed you to set the ratios for FSB/HTT, LDT/FSB, CPU/FSB, etc. I'd hunt like crazy for specific OCZ DDR2 RAM modules from specific batches that had the tolerances I was looking for. At a few points, had the highest perf overclocks (even among liquid cooling - mine was passive with a polished heatsink) on various leaderboards and my 4GB DDR2 system frequently could beat out 8GB DDR3 systems (with full stability via MemTest x86) on GeekBench like tests. WRT Apple Silicon I think about those days a lot - just thinking about the perf AMD, OCZ, and DFI could have repeatedly squeezed out if they all were one company setting the same tolerances on all silicon and power delivery. I have to imagine a large amount of the perf wins come from having consistent FSB, HTT, and LDT channels that can have the channel relay ratios optimally configured instead of buffering up the "lowest common denominator" silicon manufacturing tolerances.