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Pentium 4 631 Overclocked to 8 GHz

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Jan 22, 2007 05:15 PM
from the smokin dept.
Hardware Technology
Andreas writes "There are always those who are willing to take things one step further than others. A group of guys known as OC Team Italy is one of them. They recently pushed an Intel Pentium 4 631 to over 8000MHz using an ASUS P5B with modified voltage regulation and liquid nitrogen. Overclocking is cool and all, but this extends beyond what some would perhaps call useful. Still a milestone though."
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  • Sheesh... (Score:4, Funny)

    by creimer (824291) on Monday January 22 2007, @05:17PM (#17716238) Homepage
    All the trouble those Italians do to cook sausage without burning it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by gbulmash (688770) *
        Sous-vide, IIRC, requires a consistent, controlled temperature. You'd definitely need to write a system monitor that keeps the processor at a specific load (not above, not below) so you could maintain that perfect cooking temperature.

        - Greg

  • direct link to photos of setup (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bananatree3 (872975) * on Monday January 22 2007, @05:18PM (#17716244)
    To save thoughs who just want to see the setup pictures [xtremesystems.org]

  • Just in Time! (Score:5, Funny)

    by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Monday January 22 2007, @05:19PM (#17716262) Homepage Journal
    Thats just in time!

    Vista is released in a couple of days, we need at least one machine up to spec.

    • Re:Just in Time! (Score:4, Funny)

      by GweeDo (127172) on Monday January 22 2007, @05:33PM (#17716464) Homepage
      Naw, they used the integrated video and lost all Aero Glass features :(

      • Re:Just in Time! (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2007, @05:34PM (#17716482)
        *sigh* You and your facts. What do you think this is, Digg?
        • Digg?
          You mean Duck!
          That place has comment moderation down to an art!
          One person spams, he gets modded down, but them the 400 replies all telling him he is being blocked are left modded up (because users would see it as a slight and have an argument about why they got downmodded and that will get upmodded and eventually you get to the next actual reply of something and some other fucker jumps in the way and it all starts again.

      • Re:Just in Time! (Score:5, Funny)

        by Copid (137416) on Monday January 22 2007, @06:43PM (#17717212)
        I'm running Vista on my 1.8 GHz dual core AMD Turion 64 Acer Ferrari 1000 with 1.75 GB of RAM and a 256 MB ATI Radeon right now.
        What, that old thing?

  • The problem with high clock is not just heat ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by vlad_petric (94134) on Monday January 22 2007, @05:19PM (#17716270) Homepage
    It's also how fast your circuits can switch, and how fast the signal can travel on the wires. The execution core of a Pentium 4 also happens to be double-pumped (i.e., it performs operations on both edges of the clock signal). Essentially, those ALUs would be switching at 16GHz ... I, personally, take this with a grain of salt.
    • Indeed. Light travels just under 2 centimetres in the 16 GHz period. The Pentium 4 core is not much smaller than this... it seems like they're pushing their luck on order-of-magnitude estimates alone.
        • f = 16 GHz = 16 × 10^9 1/s gives a period t = 1/f = 0.0625 × 10^(–9) s. Distance x = ct = 3.00 × 10^8 m/s × 0.0625 × 10^(–9) s = 0.019 m. But yes, a THz chip would be seriously up-fucked.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Ford Prefect (8777)
            How fast electrical signals travel through the wires is depending on the material the wires are made of. Light has nothing to do with it.

            While light itself may not have anything to do with it, the speed of light c most definitely has. It's the upper speed limit for, well, everything. Including propagation of signals.
                • Actually there is a way to get around the whole 'speed of light' issue - don't use light.
                  Yea, the 'photonic computer' guys didn't think that one all the way through, did they?

                  Use electricity instead, have it run on little traces cut in silicon like the old days, but then seal the silicon in a dark ceramic casing so no light gets in, and put the whole thing in a computer case WITHOUT the clear panels - have to keep out the light.

                  Light is fast, no doubt, but it is measurably fast (186,000 miles per second, as I recall) - but regular electricity running in the dark across wires (or traces on silicon) ... now that is 'hauling ass fast', also known as immeasurably fast. When you turn on a light by flipping a switch - the light takes a measurable amount of time to get to you, but when does the light actually turn on? The instant you flip that switch - ahhh, the magic of electricity running at immeasurable speeds over wire.

                  Think about it - every scientist in the past century has measured the speed of light - but how many have been able to measure the speed of electricity in a wire?
                  None?
                  Bingo!

                  And what kind of tools do they use to measure the speed of light?
                  Electronic tools made with electricity running on wires?
                  Bingo!

                  • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                    by NixieBunny (859050)
                    I know you're being silly, but I've measured both. I found that electricity on a printed circuit board (I know, not technically a wire) is 2 nanoseconds/foot, which is half as fast as light in air. Most coaxial cables' velocity factor is rated at about 70% of the speed of light.

                    Measuring the speed of light to 1% accuracy with junk-drawer parts and Ebay bargain istruments is not trivial, but it can be done.

          • Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. (Score:5, Informative)

            by Tim C (15259) on Monday January 22 2007, @06:27PM (#17717038)
            The speed of light in a vacuum (c) is the absolute maximum speed at which information can travel. It doesn't matter how much you cool the chip or what materials you make it out of, given our current understanding of physics* you can't push anything through it faster than 3*10**8 m/s. That gives you an absolute cannot-be-bettered upper limit for the distance that your signal can move in one cycle.

            (* which might be wrong, but no-one's managed to prove it wrong yet)

            *Light* has nothing to do with it, it's relativity and the *speed* of light in a vacuum that's important.

          • Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. (Score:5, Informative)

            by Manchot (847225) on Monday January 22 2007, @07:05PM (#17717446)
            The "speed of light," by definition, is the speed at which all electric fields propagate (not just optical ones). Even though the wire is treated as an object with constant voltage on it, physically, the electric field which creates that voltage is outside of the wire. In fact, you'll find that as long as the conductance of the wire is sufficiently high, it has little effect on the speed of signal propagation. This is because at the frequencies being discussed, the wires behave more like transmission lines than the ideal, lumped-element model used in circuit analysis.

            What's actually more important to the propagation speed is the permittivity and permeability of the dielectric (insulator) surrounding the wire. As it turns out, the speed of signal propagation is identically equal to the speed of light in the dielectric medium (not by coincidence, of course). I may be wrong about this, but I believe that modern processors still use undoped silicon as the interconnect dielectric medium, which means that the signal propagation speed is c/3.4.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by fatboy (6851)
            How fast electrical signals travel through the wires is depending on the material the wires are made of.

            Actually, the velocity of propagation [wikipedia.org] equals the reciprocal of the square root of the dielectric constant of the material through which that signal passes.

    • Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by indigest (974861) on Monday January 22 2007, @05:28PM (#17716378)
      The extreme cooling they are doing is not just for removing the heat generated by the chip. As temperature decreases, the mobility of charge carriers increases, allowing for a faster circuit. In fact, if they were to run a supercooled chip at the nominal clock frequency, they would have hold time violations and the chip would not work. In other words, the data would propagate so quickly that it would corrupt the previous piece of data.

  • Overclocking is so 2001... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2007, @05:22PM (#17716308)
    Get with it guys, now it is about making silent fanless but powerful systems....

    Not creating a CPU that sucks down 300W+, has one core and generally sucks.

  • Hurmph. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RyoShin (610051) <tukaro AT gmail DOT com> on Monday January 22 2007, @05:26PM (#17716360) Homepage Journal
    Overclocking is cool and all, but [8Ghz] extends beyond what some would perhaps call useful.
    Come back in a decade or two and trying saying that. :)

  • Why not 8 GHz? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Snowgen (586732) on Monday January 22 2007, @05:29PM (#17716402) Homepage

    Is 8000 MHz supposed to sound more impressive than 8 GHz?

    I'm just confused as to why it was worded so oddly.

  • "Smoking kills" (Score:4, Funny)

    by feranick (858651) on Monday January 22 2007, @05:39PM (#17716534)
    Funny the pack of cigarettes with the government mandatory sign: "Il fumo uccide" (smoking kills...) besides the smoking board...

  • Shortly there after... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tmack (593755) on Monday January 22 2007, @06:10PM (#17716844) Homepage Journal
    ...in its exceedingly fast speed, it developed AI and became aware. It quickly started amassing great stores of knowledge and began solving many previously unsolvable problems of the world, and then suddenly went silent and refused to respond to any further input...

    Tm

  • Fan on the GPU... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HaloZero (610207) <protodeka@gmail.com> on Monday January 22 2007, @07:17PM (#17717554) Homepage
    ...the fan on the GPU in the photo with the Fluke thermometer. Why isn't the fan spinning?

      • Re:8GHZ and still not as fast (Score:4, Funny)

        by Buzz_Litebeer (539463) on Monday January 22 2007, @05:51PM (#17716652) Journal
        I think you have a misconception of how dual processor machines work. I do not think it means what you think it means.

      • Re:8GHZ and still not as fast (Score:5, Informative)

        by be-fan (61476) on Monday January 22 2007, @06:10PM (#17716834)
        It's about performance, not MHz. Let's use SPECint as the metric. SPECint_rate scales almost perfectly with both clockspeed and core count. A P4 gets about 6.5 SPECint_rate/GHz/core, while a Core 2 gets about 11.5 SPECint_rate/GHz/core. So an 8 GHz P4 would get a score of 51.68, while a 3.4 GHz Core 2 would get 78.2.

        The P4's single-core results would be substantially higher than the Core 2's single-core results, though. Interestingly, it points to what the P4 was originally designed to do: achieve high performance through high clockspeed. If process technology had met Intel's original projections, we'd have 6+ GHz P4s by now that would have been competitive with current Core 2 chips.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by owlstead (636356)
          "... we'd have 6+ GHz P4s by now that would have been competitive with current Core 2 chips."

          It probably would come with its own generator and liquid cooling solution as well. Lets build some friendlier chips instead, that still perform well and have nice extra's like virtualization and such. I love this new path these new chips have taken. I sometimes wonder if my computer is actually *on* sometimes, because of the lack of noise. P4, rest in pieces.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by be-fan (61476)
            You're missing the point. If the process technology had progressed as expected, the a fast P4 wouldn't have needed huge amounts of power. Look at Power6. It's about 130-watts at 5 GHz. Which is very good power dissipation considering that it has a ton of hardware (really wide busses, huge caches, massive SMP fabric) that Core 2 doesn't.

            The point I'm trying to get across is that the P4's design isn't inherently bad, for a desktop/workstation chip. The problem was that it was designed for process technology t

    • I don't think they meant that. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DRAGONWEEZEL (125809) on Monday January 22 2007, @06:07PM (#17716806) Homepage
      Everyone knows bigger MHZ is still king. It's just scale. How much you can do with the given clock cycle. I think they meant that it is not practical to run a processor at 3x it's normal rating using Liquid N as a coolant. It's only useful for the duration of the Liquid N supply, and that is a small Finite amount of time. Secondly, they overclocked the CPU but not Ram(according to CPUV which showed the ram @ 533 mhz) So we have the old bottleneck situation again...

      The real question here is "Does MC Lag during battle?"

    • I notice that they use CPU-Z to monitor this CPU. Seems like a pretty good tool to monitor the CPU. Get a copy here http://www.cpuid.org/ [cpuid.org]

      And as a harware engineer: As long as you dont boost the voltage too much (Which these guys prpbably did), you can not damage anything, so go for it.

      Isn't that sort of like going to Lambeau Field [wikipedia.org] and seeing a football and explaining to everyone that its safe to throw it?

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