Overclockers Top 6GHz With A 3.6GHz-Rated P4

sH4RD writes "The 6GHz barrier has been broken by two guys, a little LN2 (liquid nitrogen for those not as chemistry inclined), and an Intel Pentium 4 (Prescott) 3.60GHz. Check out some icing and some proof of speed. Better yet take a look at how fast it calculates pi. Also be sure to check out the original announcement."

Comments

Erm...

[__aavhli5779]

I sure hope they were using Gentoo, because if not they couldn't take advantage of those incredible speeds with some hot -O3 -funroll-loops action :P

In all seriousness, this is pretty amazing, but I can't really see the usefulness. For sheer geek pride, sure, why not? But as far as I can tell the expense involved outweighs any gain in performance; for probably half of what these poor folks spent getting a P4 to run stably at 6 ghz (and it doesn't even sound super-stable from what I've read) they could've probably bought a couple more CPUs and had a proper SMP system instead. Regardless, I admire their tenacity and mourn for the warranty on their poor CPU :P

Re:Erm...

[bizpile]

But as far as I can tell the expense involved outweighs any gain in performance;

Isn't that what being a geek is all about? It's a "becuase it's there"-type of thing.

Tops 6ghz?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it tops 6 GHz, but they only calculate pi at 5.4 GHz? Sounds like the only thing it can run at 6 GHz without crashing is CPU-Z...

Re:Cold!

[_Pablo]

If Intel hadn't decided to kill P4 in favour of PM then we may have had to do it sooner rather than later!

It would be amazing to have to use LN2...but then again since I first stuck my finger on top of my 68000 and realising it was a lot hotter than my 6502 i'm constantly amazed how hot these things are getting.

Re:Throughput not clock speed

[PureCreditor]

the physical speed limitations of hard drives (sustained read/write, not SATA) is the real wimpy part of the bandwidth....

when running multi-gigabyte SQL queries (at work, our entire RDBMS is about 1TB), the crawling speeds of the hard drive is evident. the time it takes to develop the SQL query and the time it takes to run it are comparable (btw, the queries are okay optimized)

6GHz might be useful for 3D rendering jobs or obsessive gamers, but for the bulk of the business world, the HDD is still the pain in the a**

This is the type of thing.....

[Sean Johnson]

that helps to perpetuate the "MHz myth". If MHz don't matter, why are these guys doing these crazy things to increase the MHz? I know it is just for the "fun of it", "to see if it can be done". However,(tongue-in-cheek) this stuff just influences people to rely on MHz numbers more and more. It teaches young-ins that more MHz is better whatever the cost. What we need is a great story about how Bill Buxley and his pal Jan Hammy had strung 32 CPU's together with chicken wire in thier garage. This would be the parallelism hack equivalent to overclocking. Pretty soon though we would have to contend with the "parallelism myth" and the industry would in turn be trying to deemphasis parallelism for Mhz. It would be a cycle in that manner until finally one day the industry hits it big with the "quantumn computing myth". Stay tuned if your still alive by then. LOL!

Re:This is the type of thing.....

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

MHz *does* matter. A 3GHz Opteron should be 2x as fast as a 1.5GHz Opteron (of course, that doesn't take into account the rest of the system - memory bandwidth, disk bandwidth, etc.)

The "MHz Myth" referrs to the fact that MHz is a poor metric to compare CPUs with. It's fair to compare a 3.2GHz P4 Prescott to a 3.6GHz P4 Prescott and expect that the 3.6GHz chip will be faster. What doesn't make sense is to comare a 3GHz P4 to a 2.4GHz Opteron and claim that the P4 is faster.