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Intel Windows Hardware Technology

Overclocker Pushes Intel Core i7-7700K Past 7GHz Using Liquid Nitrogen (hothardware.com) 139

Posted by BeauHD from the if-you-can't-stand-the-heat-get-out-of-the-kitchen dept.
MojoKid writes from a report via HotHardware: If you've had any doubts of Intel's upcoming Kaby Lake processor's capabilities with respect to overclocking, don't fret. It's looking like even the most dedicated overclockers are going to have a blast with this series. Someone recently got a hold of an Intel Core i7-7700K chip and decided to take it for an overclocking spin. Interestingly, the motherboard used is not one of the upcoming series designed for Kaby Lake, but the chip was instead overclocked on a Z170 motherboard from ASRock (Z170M OC Formula). That bodes well for those planning to snag a Kaby Lake CPU and would rather not have to upgrade their motherboard as well. With liquid nitrogen cooling the processor, this particular chip peaked at just over 7GHz, which helped deliver a SuperPi 32M time of 4m 20s, and a wPrime 1024M time of 1m 33s. It's encouraging to see the chip breaking this clock speed, even with extreme methods, since it's a potential relative indicator of how much headroom will be available for overclocking with more standard cooling solutions.
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Overclocker Pushes Intel Core i7-7700K Past 7GHz Using Liquid Nitrogen More

Overclocker Pushes Intel Core i7-7700K Past 7GHz Using Liquid Nitrogen

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  • Most depressing thing I've read all week (Score:5, Interesting)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @06:06AM (#53564791) Journal
    If I recall correctly, the first time someone got over 8 Ghz was back in ~2004, over a decade ago. I know clock speed isn't everything, but parallelism will only get you so far. I really hope before we get to 5nm chips, we can get some 20 Ghz clock speeds. The amount of work you'll be able to do on a single thread will be amazing.

    • Re:Most depressing thing I've read all week (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @06:29AM (#53564839)

      If I recall correctly, the first time someone got over 8 Ghz was back in ~2004, over a decade ago. I know clock speed isn't everything, but parallelism will only get you so far. I really hope before we get to 5nm chips, we can get some 20 Ghz clock speeds. The amount of work you'll be able to do on a single thread will be amazing.

      The only thing inherently inefficient about parallel computing is the inefficiency created by the overhead required to keep the software consistent and coherent. The real problem with multi-core computing is very little software is written in such a way that it can run on multiple CPUs. Hell, my professors were saying that in college 15 years ago, and it's still true today.

      • Re:Most depressing thing I've read all week (Score:5, Interesting)

        by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @06:36AM (#53564859) Journal

        The only thing inherently inefficient about parallel computing

        Not all things are parallelizable. Sometimes you must wait for part A to finish before part B can begin. The obvious example is anything requiring user input (like games). Another example is databases.....when they wan to maintain ACID, they must do some things sequentially (which is unfortunately a huge bottleneck). See also, Amdahl's law [wikipedia.org].

        • Re:Most depressing thing I've read all week (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Ramze ( 640788 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @07:45AM (#53564953)

          This is true, but the CPU isn't the bottleneck for your examples. For user input (especially games), the user is the bottleneck. Games largely benefit from parallelization for rendering graphics. The logic isn't the bottleneck, and the latency for the response of user input is imperceptible to the human. For most instances, the RAM and CPU are waiting on the human and already have everything loaded to respond to the human. If a human's choice requires the loading of a different zone, the game could even predict which zone would load and pre-load a zone without human input, but dump it if the input wasn't what was predicted. Still, it's the I/O for the disk that's the bottleneck, not the CPU.

          As for databases, the biggest bottleneck is the storage medium. Depending on the database and how it's divided, one can even run many tasks on the same database simultaneously so long as the tables don't interact. Ramping up the CPU speed does little to nothing if the I/O to the storage medium of the database is slow b/c the db won't unlock the region of the database for the next transaction until the last transaction is written at least to a buffer if not the final storage medium.

          For that example, the best way to improve DB processing is to add RAM, add cache, and increase the clock speed of both.... if possible, even let entire tables if not the full database to exist in RAM and only write to disk periodically as a save-state. Even DDR4 2400 RAM only operates around 1.2 Ghz, though with access on rising and falling edge, it's effectively 2.4 ghz. What is your 20 Ghz CPU going to do with 10 cycles between every read and write to RAM ? Current Intel CPUs have a 4 stage pipeline. Even with a sizable cache at a higher speed, it's going to choke on the RAM latency... especially for large sequential database transactions. RAM is already hot enough to fry eggs on, so it'll be until the next RAM replacement tech comes out before we see some real boosts there. Maybe in a year or two.

          I'm curious what exactly you'd like to run at 20 Ghz through the general purpose CPU registers that can't be done better/faster with extensions using specialized hardware. For instance, x265 HEVC video playback can really heat up a CPU to nearly 100% usage, but if it has x265 decoding hardware, the CPU barely breaks 1% playing the same video on a similar CPU architecture and speed. Seems if you have a single thread that you need to have repetitively run at very high speeds, you'd rather have a FPGA or some other hardware to accommodate whatever you're trying to do rather than a general purpose cpu.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Kjella ( 173770 )

            I'm curious what exactly you'd like to run at 20 Ghz through the general purpose CPU registers that can't be done better/faster with extensions using specialized hardware.

            Nothing, obviously. I'll just submit my DFS4ME (do funky shit for me) instruction to Intel and I'm sure they'll put it in the next stepping or create a special batch just for me. I can even pay $50 extra, though I need it next week. I'll also reverse engineer and patch that proprietary binary I got to use the new instruction, that totally won't be any work or void any support. Or I could buy that 20 GHz machine and have everything magically work much, much faster. Nah, I'll just do the first one.

            • Given that the 20 GHz machine isn't actually possible with current technology, implementing your DSF4ME instruction in an ASIC really is your only option if you need it to be that fast.

          • I'm curious what exactly you'd like to run at 20 Ghz through the general purpose CPU registers that can't be done better/faster with extensions using specialized hardware

            Anything (pretty much) can be done faster with specialized hardware (hardware RAIDs are usually slower than software RAIDs for some reason), but the more processing you can get done between frames at 50fps the better.

      • I am guessing most developers aren't that good at multi-threading. For most jobs it isn't necessary, and when it is someone will do a good enough job or find the developer or library that will take care of it.

        If you ever do multi-core GPGPU you see there is a threshold below which just using the CPU is good enough and may be faster. Part of that is that you only really benefit from the GPGPU if the processing queue is kept full.

        Then there are languages such as NodeJS which are single threaded and when you n

    • Re:Most depressing thing I've read all week (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ramze ( 640788 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @07:08AM (#53564911)

      Intel gave up on increasing clock speeds way back when they hit 4Ghz. They hit a wall, and they're done, so I wouldn't expect them to revisit it. That's when they went to multi-core. Every computer does better with dual core over single core. Most do better with quad core than dual core. (because even if a single program isn't compiled for multi-core, different programs can be assigned different cores). With VR tech and GPUs added to the cores, multi-core is likely going to continue to be the area of development for some time. As always, expect new physics and graphics extensions as well as codecs.

      Multi-core means managing the power and speed of each core individually and allowing some to power down while ramping up one or two to keep the thermal and power envelopes within tolerances. The biggest metric for Intel is performance per Watt -- as data centers are concerned about power usage for the machines and the air conditioning systems.

      I don't think there is enough of a market for enthusiasts that want 20 Ghz clock speeds for Intel to bother even doing the research for new materials to pull that off... assuming it's even possible without extreme cooling.

      • Intel gave up on increasing clock speeds way back when they hit 4Ghz

        Well yeah, they 'gave up' because the technology wouldn't allow them to increase the clock speed. Halfing the die size didn't give an automatic speed boost like it had in previous generations.

        But if the next halfing of the die size does give a speed boost, do you think Intel will reject it? Of course not. A doubling of clock speed (all else equal) gives you better performance than adding an extra core.

        • lots of other parts on the CPU that will give you a bigger speed boost before adding speed and cores

        • There will be no more automatic speed boosts.

          The reason there were jumps before as the die size decreased was that the semiconductors took less time to change states, so they could switch faster. Now, though, the parts are getting close enough together that quantum tunneling becomes a major problem, and increases in switching speed are accompanies by a drastic increase in error rates. We can still make the features smaller, but increases in speed will likely be counteracted by increases in required stabiliz

        • A doubling of clock speed (all else equal) gives you better performance than adding an extra core.

          But does it give you better performance per watt? That's the metric they care about, because it's the metric their high-power computing customers care about. And doubling clock speed, all else equal, does not give you more performance per watt than adding an extra core.

          Take a look at really high-end CPUs (say, $2000+) and you'll see that almost none of them reach 3 GHz, and many are below 2.5 GHz. But they have a dozen-plus cores, and are designed to be used in two or four-processor motherboards. That's w

          • Huge numbers of processors and cores only give the highest performance if the software is designed to make effective use of those resources. Typical amateur software and most freeware is single-threaded, and that software benefits from high clock rates and high instructions-per-clock.

            The design choices that allow large numbers of moderate-power cores differ from the choices that would allow one or two extremely fast cores, and Intel isn't about to design a different core that would optimize single thread sp

            • Huge numbers of processors and cores only give the highest performance if the software is designed to make effective use of those resources. Typical amateur software and most freeware is single-threaded, and that software benefits from high clock rates and high instructions-per-clock.

              The design choices that allow large numbers of moderate-power cores differ from the choices that would allow one or two extremely fast cores, and Intel isn't about to design a different core that would optimize single thread speed. For home users that aren't running multi-threaded games, this direction of development is not in our favor.

              For home users, computers got fast enough years ago. Consumers are pushing for thinner and lighter, longer battery life, etc., not more horsepower. The customers demanding power are the big data centers... and they do know how to make effective use of large numbers of cores, and their focus -- as I said previously -- is on performance per watt, not raw performance.

              Heh. I should mention that the desktop in my home office has 40 cores @ 2.6 Ghz. My heavy-duty processing requirements are for compiling large

      • I don't think there is enough of a market for enthusiasts that want 20 Ghz clock speeds for Intel to bother even doing the research for new materials to pull that off... assuming it's even possible without extreme cooling.

        I don't believe this will be possible even with extreme cooling. I read a article once, might have even been from /., where the switching speeds inside the cpu where approaching the light speed barrier. Meaning the switches where changing as fast as they possibly ever could.

        I don't remember in the paper if this was a physical problem today or a theoretical problem down the road. Whatever it was, the light speed and switching speed will be the final limit on the mhz race.

        • Not the switching speed, but the transit time from one section of the chip to another. At 20 GHz, a signal will go less than 1 cm per cycle.

      • They hardly gave up or hit a wall. Hell the Pentium 4 was slated to go to 12GHz and beyond. You'd have needed the liquid nitrogen for that, or use it to heat your house.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Clock speed certainly isn't everything. Modern processors can perform orders of magnitude more instructions per clock than a cpu from 2004. Its the equivalent of running that 2004 cpu at 25Ghz

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Frequency is not an actual measure of CPU speed, as the average number of instructions per cycle were way smaller in 2004 (on a P4 CPU) than it is today.

      Today, processors have much smaller pipelines (14 vs Prescott's 31). Pipelines contain instructions scheduled to be executed, being in different stages of executions (eg: decoded, having their necessary input ready, having their result computed in a temporary storage but not yet committed). To run a cpu efficiently, you need to keep the pipeline full. When

      • Incidentally, this is a rehash on the discussions of superscalar vs superpipelined processing that we had in RISC CPUs in the 90s - whether more MHz were better w/ more pipeline stages - like in the Alpha and MIPS III, or more pipelines were better w/ fewer stages, but running in tandem. Today's multi-core is a macrocosm of superscalar, while what this story discusses - pumping up the GHz - is essentially trying brute force on the problem.

      • The main bottleneck for a modern cpu are main memory accesses. What is amazing is that all of the prediction and the huge (192+) number of uOPS that can be on the deck at once is able to absorb enough of the massive latencies main memory accesses cause to bring the actual average IPC back towards roughly ~1.4. And this is with the cache misses causing *only* around ~6 GBytes/sec worth of main memory accesses per socket (with a maximum main memory bandwidth of around 50 GBytes/sec per socket, if I remember

    • Ever heard the phrase "size doesn't matter, it's knowing how to use it"? Same for raw CPU speed.

      First of all, branch prediction and pipelining has become way better in those past 10 years. Pipelines are much shorter today, and coupled with near perfect branch prediction, this alone speeds up the CPU by a factor 2 to 3. The reason for this is simply that a branch (a conditional jump, to be exact) used to mean that the CPU had to dump everything it had in its instruction pipeline and start anew from where the

      • From your example, the hard drive is over 9,000,000 times slower. It's a big reason why virtual memory doesn't really work right anymore. Any quantity of misses, and a mechanical hard drive will not be able to handle the load. Even an SSD is dead slow in comparison to main RAM.

        You have a CPU running at 3 GHz, at 3 BILLION instructions per second. And you have a hard drive with an access time of 3ms (which is ... let's say faster than anything I've seen in a HDD). The CPU would have to wait for over 9,000

        • Paging to a hard drive doesn't really work in this day and age, the demands of the VM system (due to the commensurant increase in scale of modern machines) are well in excess of what one or two HDDs can handle.

          However, virtual memory works quite well with a SSD. Sure, the SSD isn't as fast as memory, but the scale works similarly to how cpu caches vs main memory scaling works. Its back in the ballpark so the system as a whole works quite well.

          It depends on the workload of course... browsers are particular

        • It's a big reason why virtual memory doesn't really work right anymore.

          Virtual memory wasn't/isn't to provide increased (or even sustained) speed, but rather increased overall system capacity. So it still works fine as intended.

    • It is depressing. Moores Law is dead in the CPU space. People don't realize how significant that is. Digital computing has hit a real physical dead end.

      • It is depressing. Moores Law is dead in the CPU space. People don't realize how significant that is. Digital computing has hit a real physical dead end

        Not really. How many people really need faster or more powerful computers? Well at least for our desktops. Even that being said most servers that I have been working with have 20 ore more core but still top out between 2 and 3 ghz.

        Most computing aspects of the public can be done by a modest 2 core processor at 2.6 ghz or slower even. It doesn't take a i7 to read email, surf the web, or balance a check book. I have a 3.6 ghz i7 at work and all I use it for a glorified terminal server and place to

        • How many people really need faster or more powerful computers?

          *raise my hand*.

          Imagine having an embedded CPU running at 10 GhZ.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Cederic ( 9623 )

          FM17 still hits 100% CPU on one core for well over a minute during new game initiation. Yeah, I'd like that to go faster. I already have a m.2 pci drive, I have lovely fast RAM and I have a CPU running at 4.2GHz. It's not fast enough.

      • Its far from dead, and there are plenty of new materials and processes kicking around to keep it going indefinitely.

    • Personally, I'm not worried at all about the stagnation of clock speeds. GHz aren't everything, instructions per clock have greatly increased even if clock speed hasn't. This means that a 4GHz Skylake single thread is much faster on the same task when compared to a 4GHz Sandy bridge single thread. See chart: https://www.nextplatform.com/w... [nextplatform.com]
  • Some minor gains but an otherwise mediocre cycle.

    Still I'm anxious to upgrade my Core i7-3630QM. This looks good enough.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
      Wait for Zen. Should be good. Intel's repeated 5% gains are not enough to drive an upgrade cycle for me or anyone I recommend to. 3-4Gen is still more than adequate for most tasks.

      • Zen pci-e lanes will crush intel and no slow DMI link to jam up the sata / pci-e storage / networking / etc.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Holi ( 250190 )
          I hope your right, but AMD has failed to wow since the Ghz race ended.

          • I hope your right, but AMD has failed to wow since the Ghz race ended.

            I hope so. As someone that has been burned twice in the past by AMD's promises, I chose intel this time for my workstation. It will be a number of years before I will conciser switching back to AMD.

            All though I have to admit that 8350 did make a nice centos server.

        • Rumors (because that's what they are at this point) talk about 32 PCIe lanes for desktop Zen.
          That is good but not exceptional, the better Intel E-series CPUs have 40.

          But Zen will probably beat the E-series in price while coming (very) close in performance, much better than the situation with Bulldozer. That should be enough to shake up the market, please the AMD fans and maybe force Intel to rethink its very high prices.

          In short, I don't expect Zen to be a wonder CPU, but I expect it to bring real competiti

          • Kaby Lake-X only has 16 + DMI

            ZEN may have 32-64 main or 32 main + upto 32 for storage / network / usb / etc. (not stacked like Intel DMI is.)

    • If you're looking for a small bump in the mean time you can get a i7-3940XM. It shares the rPGA988B socket with the 3630QM. They're ~$300 [ebay.com] on eBay.

      In Benchmarks it's ~20% faster than what you have currently.

      It's still faster than the 6820HQ (8765/1891) or E3-1505M (8699/1887) CPUs that Dell ship in their newest 7000 Precision lines [dell.com].

    • I believe that I speak for a lot of us when I say we'll believe it when we see it. The specs for Zen are look impressive when compared to the old Bulldozer cores. But compared to some of the current Intel cores, not so much

      I remember the specs that first came out for the Bulldozer cores. They looked pretty impressive at the time. But in real life they didn't live up to those specs. An this I know. I had two AMD bulldozer systems at the same time.

      I do hope you are correct in your enthusiastic co

      • There isn't any such thing as a 'strong amd to offset intel'.

        Intel has an extremely efficient in house manufacturing division and billions of cash in the bank. At any given moment they can drop their prices, throw in some new features and submarine AMD, Having to farm out manufacturing to outfits that are nowhere near as efficient and losing money for over a decade aren't a good platform.

        The thing is, AMD has never really meant much to Intel. Since the Pentium 4 days, the only thing AMD did was push inte

        • I expect Zen will be a fine product that uses more power, makes more heat, and performs below its Intel counterparts.

          I believe you just said what all of us are thinking.

  • umpf... (Score:3)

    by 4im ( 181450 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @06:41AM (#53564867)

    I googled for "highest cpu clock speed" and got e.g. http://valid.x86.fr/records.html

    It seems this is a far cry from what's been done elsewhere, with numbers there showing over 8.5GHz.

    Anyway, my criteria are rather low-energy, low-noise computers than extreme clock frequencies, even if I can make use of them.

  • Meanwhile, the bus speed... (Score:5, Informative)

    by inflex ( 123318 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @06:50AM (#53564885) Homepage Journal

    ... lumbers along at 100MHz still.

    Time we started working on that side of the hardware some more.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drolli ( 522659 )

      well, then we need another kind of connector with much tighter tolerances/mroe expensive manufacturing processes

      • well, then we need another kind of connector with much tighter tolerances/mroe expensive manufacturing processes

        Cray (reportedly) did this with their systems. For example, they would measure individual chip speed when building their memory boards and put faster chips farther from the connector and slower chips closer. Of, course the Cray 2 cost about $17 million back in the day -- I was one of the admins on voyager [nasa.gov] at NASA LaRC in the late 1980s. '88 Cray Too Old For Nasa [dailypress.com]

    • ... lumbers along at 100MHz still.

      Time we started working on that side of the hardware some more.

      Huh? Bus speeds haven't been that slow since the 90s, and they aren't the limiting factor in CPU intensive operations.

  • Slightly offtopic (Score:3)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Wednesday December 28, 2016 @07:17AM (#53564925) Homepage
    Let me copy this comment since I believe it's kinda relevant.

    Kaby Lake is an embarrassment and should have never seen the light of day - at least not as a "new" architecture - it's anything but "new". The CPU core is completely the same, the GPU core is minimally improved. Intel should have released it as SkyLake with XX50 postfix (6750/6650/etc) because it's what it is.

    I'm quite sure it's Intel's marketing department and investors who insisted that Intel should release something "new". I want to believe Ryzen will pan out to give a good blow to Intel and then we'll have some real improvement/competition.

    • What kind of 'new' stuff do you want? I don't really want anything new from Intel's architecture, I just want a faster chip. New instructions seem dumb to me (but I'm sure some people want them).

      • I just want a faster chip

        New instructions seem dumb to me

        That's exactly how they get faster chips with the 'same' clock speed.

        Some embedded chips can only do int16 adds/multiplies in hardware and rely on software tricks to do floating point math, they're slow compared to a chip than can do the floating points adds/multiplies in hardware.

        Compare LINPACK benchmarks using AVX2, AVX and SSE. [intel.com]

      • What kind of 'new' stuff do you want? I don't really want anything new from Intel's architecture, I just want a faster chip. New instructions seem dumb to me (but I'm sure some people want them).

        I just want a faster horse.

        Sincerely Yours,
        Henry Ford

    • this is how science and engineering work stupid

      small improvements and over time it's a big leap. like Apple's CPU's. 6 years ago they were just another reference design. little changes every year and now they are faster than some of the desktop CPU's on the market

  • My dream (fantasy?!) is for computers (& networks!!) that are faster than me. It should be waiting on me, not me waiting on it. All day long I wait on my computer. They are not even close to being fast enough. It doesn't help at all that the software seems to be slower than ever.

    • Erm, pretty stupid comment if you just think for a few seconds...
      Unless you're encoding video or 3d-rendering all-day-long, for most people, the CPU is almost always idle for everyone else and just wasting power waiting for human input.

      Even when compiling code, or rendering a web page, or doing a database transaction, the CPU wakes a couple of cores for a few seconds before it returns to almost idle.

      And by the way, if you see the CPU meter at 100%, it likely that it's not the CPU that's the bottleneck, but

      • I've gave it more than a few seconds of thought, pretty much on a daily basis while sitting there waiting. This may be slightly off topic because the article is about clock speeds, but what I said, if you read carefully, is I am waiting on a computer (& network). Of course it's a lot of things combined that causes me to be waiting.

        My personal desktop runs a i7 at 4GHz, 16 gig RAM, two 500 gig SSDs striped, an a nVidia 960. Runs like a champ, but when using it for work, I still find myself waiting.

        A l

  • I look at LN2 overclocking, shutting down all but a core or two, etc, as basically masturbation using lidocaine jelly as lube.

    Sure, it produces an interesting result.

    But, in the end, it's ultimately useless for purpose.

  • They probably turned off all the other cores and it says they used liquid nitrogen. So yes, I am still worried about its overclocking capabilities in real world usage. Also 7GHz isn't that good.

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