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.

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.

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

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

Silent. Fanless. Oil Filled.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_t he_fans/ [tomshardware.com]

I appreciate what these OC'ers are able to accomplish. Though their cooling system is not a viable solution for every day computing, I for one am amazed they've achieved this level of OC.

What I'm more curious about is how the frak they managed to get a FSB of 1,5 GHZ on a Pentium II 333 MHZ
http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=159352 [x86-secret.com]

... a nice stable 4.0 GHz on simple air cooling out of a P4 and also without having to overvoltage it too much. I think that would be just about as much processor horsepower as you could actually utilize in an x86 platform machine for practical general use and gaming too. I have a 3.4GHz P4 (a socket 478 at that) that'll do a good stable 3.8GHz on air cooling with a big copper Thermalright heatsink and a panaflo 92mm fan that doesn't sound too much like a vacuum cleaner running. It does put out an incredible amount of heat however, and I can run it at 4.0GHz on this same air cooling setup but only for very short period of time (maybe 1 to 2 minutes max before it overpowers the heatsink's capacity to dissipate the heat. I'm sure it would be plenty stable if I used water cooling, but that's a hassle and I don't want to risk a leak damaging my machine. Lately I've just been running it at the stock 3.4GHz speed because it just makes too much heat at 3.8 GHz though it does definitely give me a gaming advantage in UT2004 at the higher speeds.

ScottyH wins!

And whoever moderated my joke as 'Interesting' must be smoking crack. Geez.

...the fan on the GPU in the photo with the Fluke thermometer. Why isn't the fan spinning?

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 that turned out to have very different power usage characteristics than were projected.

So if a P4 @ 8.0GHz benches close to an Athlon at 2.0GHz, and an Athlon at 4.0GHz would maybe get close to a Core 2 Duo at 2.0GHz, that means we'd need a 16.0GHz P4 to beat a Core 2 Duo? Sweet!