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:AMD (Score:2, Interesting)
According to one of the comments (about AMD winning $1B+ from Intel) they can afford a fairly substantial freezer...
Big advantage? (Score:2, Interesting)
Phase change cooling is not really that extreme of a cooling system for benchmarking... go to Quakecon you will see quite a few people with it.
LN2 (or even better liquid He) on the other hand could be considered an unfair advantage.
Re:-40C (Score:5, Interesting)
Psh, only 29sec here (Score:3, Interesting)
on a 2x6core server at work ;)
[xxxx@xxxx smallpt]$ time ./smallpt 100
Rendering (100 spp) 100.00%
real 0m29.127s
user 5m41.044s
sys 0m0.093s
P.S. and compiling didn't take me hours, either, since I'm on Linux
You are missing the SECRET AGENDA! (Score:5, Interesting)
"Nearly 5GHz". The whole point here that everyone seems to be missing is that they made something go more than 1000 times as fast as the original 4.77 MHz IBM PC.
Now if they could give it 640MB of memory and a 110MB floppy drive...
Real Story: Windows Benchmark is Slow (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:You are missing the SECRET AGENDA! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You are missing the SECRET AGENDA! (Score:3, Interesting)
What's interesting is that someone has a job where they can just go grab the latest and greatest intel chip whenever they want to, for free.
Light speed limit (Score:3, Interesting)
Clock speed has reached the ultimate physical limit, light speed.
If you take a measuring tape to a motherboard and do some math, you'll see that once we got past a few GHz there's no way a bit can go from one chip to the other within one clock cycle.
The result of that is that chips need local caches and pipelines, etc, until the complexity starts digging into the performance. And power consumption skyrockets.
Re:You are missing the SECRET AGENDA! (Score:3, Interesting)
"Nearly 5GHz". The whole point here that everyone seems to be missing is that they made something go more than 1000 times as fast as the original 4.77 MHz IBM PC.
Well, only if you're referring to the clock speed. In terms of raw processing speed (by any reasonable benchmark), they're likely *significantly* more than 1000 times faster, since clock speed refers simply to the number of cycles per second, and doesn't account for how much work can be done per cycle.