Intel's Superchilled Test Rig 147
Barence writes "Last week, PC Pro issued a challenge to see whose PC could render a 3D graphics benchmark in the shortest time. The competition was won by an entrant with a rather unfair advantage: Intel. The processor giant's superchilled rig is overclocked to nearly 5GHz. As PC Pro explains: 'The rig itself uses phase-change cooling: in other words it's attached to a chuffing great freezer, which I believe is the big box on the right of the photo. That yellow meter with the readout is showing the temperature of its output: yes, that's minus 40 degrees Celcius.'"
Re:-40C (Score:5, Informative)
Re:February in Ottawa (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't get to -40C very frequently in most of the populated (well, more than small villages anyway) regions of canada :). -35 happens, but its far from an average, unless you live all the way north in the middle of nowhere or in the territories.
Re:AMD (Score:3, Informative)
I'm aware; I've actually invested in some 2012 call options on AMD stock. Even as-is they should be worth $10 a share. If Bobcat can make them competitive in the ultraportable market (Android on ARM is going to eat Intel's lunch in the netbook-level arena; x86's crufty instruction set can't compete at that low level), and/or Bulldozer makes them competitive in the mid- to high-end desktop market, that should go up to $13-15, easy. It is a hell of a gamble, though; they're still almost a full processor node behind Intel, and that's hard to compete with.
Re:Big advantage? (Score:3, Informative)
If you read TFA (but this is /.), it says he used a retail processor. He was also limited to a single-socket solution, which means no multi-sockets server boards.
Windows optimizations (Score:5, Informative)
There is something seriously wrong with the optimizations in his windows binary...
Ran in 36 seconds on a 4 x 8224 SE AMD opteron IBM x-server running linux (8 total cores at 3.2GHz)
Re:AMD (Score:4, Informative)
Here is what AMD was doing last year with liquid helium, which would put the temp at about 5 degrees Kelvin (about -450 degrees Fahrenheit) and running at 7 giga-hertz
Here is an AMD news blurb
http://eon.businesswire.com/portal/site/eon/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20091105006606&newsLang=en [businesswire.com]
And a nifty video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6Hf6d404QY&f=22 [youtube.com]
Poor code for a benchmark (Score:5, Informative)
I had a 30 minute look at the source code. It's clearly optimized for shortness, not for speed.
There are some obvious performance no-gos, see lines 44-45, using a double variable as a loop counter.
Performance depends to a good extent on the erand48 implementation and whether OpenMP knows that erand48 is MT-safe.
Re:Windows optimizations (Score:2, Informative)
Why would you assume that? The engineer from Intel was limited to using a single socket system. I could argue that there is something seriously wrong with your Linux compiled binary since you have 4x as many sockets and ran less than twice as fast.