Pentium 4 631 Overclocked to 8 GHz 271
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."
Sheesh... (Score:4, Funny)
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- Greg
BeOS (Score:3, Funny)
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direct link to photos of setup (Score:5, Informative)
photo mirror (Score:5, Informative)
setup2 [imageshack.us]
Thermometer at -192 deg.C [imageshack.us]
photo of screen at 8000.7MHz [imageshack.us]
CPU-Z verified [imageshack.us]
Why no benchmarks? (Score:2)
Re:Why no benchmarks? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:direct link to photos of setup (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes. Each pack of cigarettes has one of several warnings on it [cdc.gov], one of which is "Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy." That's quite straightforward and bold, in my opinion.
Re:"Smoking kills" (Score:5, Informative)
- Greg
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I am on week 13 of quitting smoking - that's 13 weeks without a single drag *sigh* it is not easy.
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Urg - link mangled (Score:4, Informative)
Check out these Australian cigarette packets [wikipedia.org].
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Just in Time! (Score:5, Funny)
Vista is released in a couple of days, we need at least one machine up to spec.
Re:Just in Time! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Just in Time! (Score:5, Funny)
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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)
The problem with high clock is not just heat ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. (Score:5, Informative)
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Yup.. I was wrong in the end, not him. Thus proving once more than moderators mod you up if you sound right, although you may be wrong. The original poster got modded down... Ain't that ironic
Of course maybe it'll be regulated out in time as people hit the clarification posts.
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this is just not true! (Score:2)
In other words, GP was right. In fact, this is just the speed of light in vacuum. In practice the waves propagate in a medium with a higher dielectric constant (epsilon_r>1), and therefore the wavelength will be even lower. Moreover, even when circuit dimensions are lamba/10, transmission line effects will come info play...
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Just off the top of my head 2 meters is about 146 MHz in free space so I believe you are off by a factor of 10^3. Dusting off my HP48 shows that 16 GHz has a wavelength of about 18.7 millimeters. I am used to doing these calculations based on wavelength for RF design but using period gives the same results. 16 GHz is 62.5 picoseconds which again yields 18.7 millimeters at the speed of light.
SiO2 has
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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.
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I wouldn't consider "it's impossible" funny stuff. You either get a divide by zero or a divide by an imaginary number.
Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. (Score:4, Funny)
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)
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!
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Measuring the speed of light to 1% accuracy with junk-drawer parts and Ebay bargain istruments is not trivial, but it can be done.
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It's still amazing how much you learn by being corrected. The beer will have washed away all that by the morning, but still...
Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. (Score:5, Informative)
(* 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.
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I wonder though. If 8 GHz (in two steps effectively 16 GHz) is bordering on impossible due to lightspeed... why was Intel claiming to have 10 GHz chips back then?
And in the end, they didn't produce them due to various issues, li
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Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. (Score:5, Informative)
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:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. (Score:4, Interesting)
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As I understand, semiconductor conductivity is dominated by the number of charge carriers, not by their mobility (as in metals), and the number of charge carriers generally decreases with temperature due to lack of thermal exitation. Does this becomes unimportant when doping is used to control the number of charge carriers? And either way, isn't the speed of transmission fairly constant?
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That's not necessarily true - it's only the case if the logic paths speed up more than the clock paths. You get a hold time violation if one flip flop launches its data, the data gets through the logic, and arrives at the capturing flip flop before (or too soon af
Re:The problem with high clock is not just heat .. (Score:2)
Overclocking is so 2001... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not creating a CPU that sucks down 300W+, has one core and generally sucks.
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http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/09/strip_out_
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.
Hurmph. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hurmph. (Score:5, Funny)
> Come back in a decade or two and trying saying that.
Oh, I'm sure noone would ever need more than 8gHz...
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And whoever moderated my joke as 'Interesting' must be smoking crack. Geez.
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Wow, I *really* hope people aren't moderating based on that kind of idea. The whole system is designed to make it possible for one to give weighting to funny things if you want to or not, and if people are trying to do 'karmic justice' this way, it's only going to screw up the system. If something's funny, mod it as funny, and don't try to help someone's karma. Karma will take care o
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I could fit all that RAM in my L2 cache nowadays with lots of space left over! (just got a Core 2 Duo) Spooky.
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Why not 8 GHz? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is 8000 MHz supposed to sound more impressive than 8 GHz?
I'm just confused as to why it was worded so oddly.
Re:Why not 8 GHz? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why not 8 GHz? (Score:4, Insightful)
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But all I thought when I read the story was of the reasoning of turning Mars into a giant space ship, whilst wiping out your own civilisation. "Because it's cool
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Yea, and if they had chosen something that people could say without looking like a retard then they might have gotten somewhere. Unfortunately, "I just picked up an extra 512 mebibytes of RAM for my computer" sounds really, really dumb.
I'll stick with my "bytes are not a SI unit, so megabyte can mean 2^20 bytes" argument.
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Re:Why not 8 GHz? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Why not 8 GHz? (Score:5, Funny)
"Smoking kills" (Score:4, Funny)
7,6 GHz with Pentium II ? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=159352 [x86-secret.com]
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Almost there! (Score:2)
Shortly there after... (Score:4, Funny)
Tm
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Tm
They use CPU-Z to monitor. Looks like a cool tool (Score:2)
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.
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The thermal stress caused by varying rates of thermal expansion for silicon, the resin underfill and the package puts a a lot of stress of the flip-chip bumps cycling between "room temp" and cryogenic temperatures. I'm not so sure that I'd say this isn't going to damage anything.
There'd like be no problem if you do it a couple of times, but over more thermal cycles, I'm certain
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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?
Re:They use CPU-Z to monitor. Looks like a cool to (Score:2)
Sure you can! If the temperature changes too fast (creating differential thermal expansion/contraction) you can physically crack the chip (or a PCB, or whatever).
Fan on the GPU... (Score:3, Interesting)
nostalgia (Score:2, Funny)
"Pentium melts in your PC, not in your hand"
Pointless. (Score:2)
Wrong... (Score:2)
Stop comparing GHz !!! (Score:2, Informative)
Core 2 duo is derived from a Pentium D architecture (which was itself carried from Pentium3 / Pentium2 / Pentium Pro).
They're completly different animals and definitly not doing the same stuf during 1 cycle.
C2D 6.8Ghz can't be compared to the 8Ghz overclock.
That's also why Intel switched from advertising MHz/GHz to advertising number of cores. Otherwise, newer and faster would have been considered by joe 6-pck because he's been trained to look for the "GHz" an
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Pentium M, not Pentium D. Which I'm sure is what you meant, but I thought I'd correct it for any more dumbasses like the person you replied to.
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Except that Core 2 Duo is a different architecture than Pentium 4, so that 3.4 Ghz is faster than 3.4 Ghz on a NetBurst would be.
Re:8GHZ and still not as fast (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:8GHZ and still not as fast (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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
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They don't have any benches but I'm pretty sure this is past the point of diminishing returns for core multipliers.
I don't think they meant that. (Score:4, Insightful)
The real question here is "Does MC Lag during battle?"
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Deustchland is happy and gaaaaaaay!
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