AMD Phenom II Overclocked To 6.5GHz 303
An anonymous reader writes "During CES a group of overclockers with access to liquid nitrogen and liquid helium for the extra boost of coldness cooled an AMD Phenom II X4 chip to -232 degrees Celsius. Once they got the chip cooled to this frigid temperature, they pushed the clock speed all the way up to 6.5GHz, which is a world record for a quad-core CPU, and then dished out an astonishing 45,474 3DMark05 score!"
I was there (Score:5, Informative)
I was there, too. The coolest it got was approximately -242 degrees C; the warmest was approximately -218 degreesC, at least while I was watching.
The party was the XtremeSystems.org [xtremesystems.org] party at its LV headquarters, and it was sponsored primarily by AMD, DFI, Gigabyte, Cooler Master, and Thermaltake. It seems to me that Commodore had a presence there, too.
See ThinkComputers' blog [thinkcomputers.org] for some more pictures (disclosure: my article).
Re:A cat has gotten my tongue (Score:3, Informative)
An slightly overclocked Core i7 965 (Extreme Edition) in a similar rig (in terms of video cards, etc) scored about 26,000 in the same benchmark (3DMark05).
So, no, they didn't have to go to liquid helium to be competetive, but going to liquid helium did allow them to set a world record (although I don't see any Guiness Book or other "official" information about this).
Re:I was there (Score:4, Informative)
Why doesn't -242C exist? -273C exists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero
Phillip.
Re:Zomg (Score:3, Informative)
No x86s in this space. IBM has POWER6 running at 5 GHz.
Metric ? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know what weird kind of units you are using in your part of the world. But the rest of the planet is using Celsius for everyday temperature measures and Kelvin for scientific measures (same step size, different zero).
And on our scale, absolute zero [wikipedia.org] (0K) is -273C.
Thus -242C (aka 31K) is pretty legal and possible temperature. (Although maybe not a very common one outside university labs and mad overclocker's basements)
Now please stop using Réaumur scale and start using what everybody else is using around.
--
PS: I checked, -242Ré is indeed impossible on Réaumur scale - 0 K is -218Ré
On the summary and grammar.... (Score:2, Informative)
During CES a group of overclocker's
a group of overclocker's what exactly? Is it just me or is the correct use of apostrophe's [sic] starting to become a lost art these days?
Re:The things you have to go through.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I was there (Score:4, Informative)
Not only are you wrong about where 0K is, you're also wrong about negative temperatures. Temperature is a statistical measure. A positive temperature corresponds to an equilibrium population distribution across a bunch of energy levels, which will have occupancy probabilities decreasing exponentially with energy. A negative temperature is obtained when the population distribution is inverted, for instance in a 2-level system where an external energy source resonantly pumps up the occupancy of the higher level. Presto, $\exp(-\beta E)$ greater than 1 requires negative $\beta$.
Re:Light Distances (Score:5, Informative)
You're off by two orders of magnitude. 6.5ghz is 153 picoseconds per cycle.
Re:NASA Processors? (Score:4, Informative)
Deep space may be cold, but vacuum is a superb insulator. The chips can't be pushed hard without extensive and expensive heat sinks. Considerations on deep space probes are reliability and low power consumption, and there isn't a lot of need for speed. Reliability, radiation hardness, and low power consumption all have requirements that oppose speed.
Furthermore, since space probes take a long time to develop and use only very well established technology, they are using nearly-obsolete semiconductors by the time they're launched. They're really old when they get where they're going. It's not fast stuff by today's standards.
Re:Light Distances (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Light Distances (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'm suprised it even worked (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The things you have to go through.. (Score:5, Informative)
You got modded funny, but I think you were probably being serious.
I think the reason is that the newer 3DMark suites advanced so much in the realm of GPU-intensiveness, that to overclock a CPU and get a higher score without being GPU-bound, you have to go back to 2005.
Re:Light Distances (Score:2, Informative)
Ummm, if you do the rest of the math, I think you'll see that the electrical signals propagate sufficiently slower than the speed of light so that they in fact can't cross the chip in a single cycle.
Also, I think if you run all the numbers, you'll find that in 45nm chips at 3GHz, a signal can't cross the entire chip in a single clock cycle. Or if it can, it can't actually be used (ie. it can't participate in logic or be stored in a flip-flop or latch).
This has been a well-known problem in micro-architecture for a few years now. And is a contributing factor for why we've gone to multiple cores instead of higher performing single cores.
Re:Zomg (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A cat has gotten my tongue (Score:4, Informative)
As of this afternoon, they /do/ make chips that expensive, and more:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16298 [techreport.com]
Their new top-of-the-line chip:
Opteron 8386 SE 8 sockets max 2.8GHz 105W $2,649