im going to try sholes

[leftbrain99]

Phones are different...

Somehow, this is true. My buddy who got his droid last month can take his to 1300, mine, the original release, runs to 1K, but 1300 just freaks it out. Shouldn't be, but maybe future runs had a different chip somewhere?

Now, THIS is a whole different matter, really. You are talking about pushing the hardware (not just chips, but interconnecting circuits as well) WAAAAY past spec'd speeds. The hardware wasn't tested at 1MHz, let alone 1300kHz, and it wasn't necessarily designed for that either. As a hardware designer, if I know that the hardware is being spec'd to run at a certain speed (which is done when the product is originally architected at the top-level, then my job is to design it to work at that speed. Then I check the PCB artwork after the physical design guys get my CAD schematics and make sure that there is sufficient track width, layer thickness, isolation, etc for digital signals at that speed as well. Then when boards come back from fab, they are tested again and again to verify that they work at that speed under the complete range of conditions allowed for.

All passive components (resisters, capacitors, etc) have certain tolerances, as do the multi-layer printed circuit boards, and to that extent, different boards will behave slightly different under extreme circumstances (like clock speeds double what the circuit was designed for, for example). The digital drivers, buffers, and all the ICs will also start operating much closer to their tolerance thresholds as well, so a very subtle variation during fab of one component or a less than ideal component seating during assembly, bad solder joint, etc, will cause a board to fail under these conditions even though it operates fine under the specified conditions.

But double the rated clock speeds is entirely different than hardware running various ROM images at more normal speeds. Failure rates will increase exponentially relative to the increase in clock speed.