Overclocking in theory..

[Sampsa]

Hi guys,

All of us know that better cooling on your CPU and raising the operating voltage allows you to raise processor's clock frequency which makes it run faster. All this is called overclocking.

I wonder how many of us really know what happens when we cool down the silicon as cold as possible and why does this allow us to run the CPU faster.

Why I started this thread is because many IT sites have recently wrote news about our liquid helium experiment and many people have posted comments like: "Why does is need to be that cold? Isn't keeping the temperature at 0C enough?". Some people have even tried to explain the theory behind all of this but so far I haven't seen one very good and definitive answer. How deep we have to go? Atom level?

Please post if you have a good knowledge about this topic or know good articles, documents or books about topics related to overclocking or methods / laws of physics. Maybe we can combine a simple but still fairly in-depth answer what is overclocking so that everyone can easily understand why we are cooling our CPUs to extremely cold temperatures.

Let me know what you think?