Comment by Aurornis
2 hours ago
This is not observable from LLM inference, where you would not encounter uniform matrices.
Power limiting does not improve performance but it does improve efficiency. You might be able to get 90% of the performance for only 70% of the power usage, for example. It does not make the card go faster though.
When thermal throttling occurs you can perform faster by running slower.
This is precicely because of the efficiency. The lower efficiency of the higher speed triggers a much lower performance sooner.
> When thermal throttling occurs you can perform faster by running slower.
This is not true unless the throttling algorithm is so broken that it's oscillating between extremes.
The parts have a curve of clock speed versus voltage. More clock speed means higher performance. That goes further up the voltage curve, meaning more power.
Throttling just moves the card further down the voltage to clock speed curve. It reduces clock speed, reducing performance.
The cards don't "perform faster by running slower". If you run the card slower, it performs slower.
with a lower power cap set, it runs cooler, which sometimes allows the GPU to reach higher boost speeds. This is a real effect on gaming GPUs - however I have no idea if it applies to datacenter GPUs