Overclockers Top 6GHz With A 3.6GHz-Rated P4

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Overclockers Top 6GHz With A 3.6GHz-Rated P4

Posted by timothy on Saturday September 25, 2004 @12:33PM from the ambitious dept.

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."

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Cold! by erick99 · 2004-09-25 12:33 · Score: 3, Interesting

Imagine having to keep a vat of liquid nitrogen at your desk in order to use your computer! Notice the Fluke thermometer showing -105C (-157F). Now that is damned cold....
-erick

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1. Re:Cold! by buford_tannen · 2004-09-25 13:45 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Imagine having to keep a vat of liquid nitrogen at your desk in order to use your computer! Notice the Fluke thermometer showing -105C (-157F). Now that is damned cold....
  
  I've just put in for a job working with superconducting magnets, using LHe.
  
  That's around 4K (-269C or -453F). Now that is damned damned damned damned cold....
  
  If only liquid helium were as inexpensive as LN2.... We'd see some a quantumn leap in overclocking I'd bet... (pun intended!)
  
  --
  Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen
2. Re:Cold! by DrMrLordX · 2004-09-25 15:21 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  They didn't kill the P4 in favor of the Pentium M. Their upcoming dual-core desktop cpus are supposedly going to be Netburst-based. I think we would all LIKE Intel to jump on the Dothan bandwagon, but whether or not they'll actually do it is completely unknown at this point. They have announced some dual-core Pentium Ms for mobile purposes, and that's it.
3. Re:Cold! by zerocool^ · 2004-09-26 01:49 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Yeah, that was one of the most amazing things I learned from my chemistry teacher in college. He was doing the standard Liquid Nitrogen funstuffs, like dipping the flower, or the raquet ball, and a couple of other things. Then he was talking about the Liquid Nitrogen, and he pointed out that it's about as expensive as milk, per volume.
  
  So, what I want to know is why don't they sell it at 7-11??!? Imagine the fun, not to mention uses. Other than computers, you can use it to freeze fruits so quickly that their water crystals don't have time to form and poke through the cell walls and make the fruit mushy... I'm sure there are a hundred other uses.
  
  ~Will
  
  --
  sig?
4. Re:Cold! by Cramer · 2004-09-26 11:58 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Use dry ice. It's far safer and more readily available. You can pick up dry ice in any cooler. N2 comes in tanks (like scuba and welding gear.)
  
  I've heard of some grocery stores selling dry ice. The only place I've known of to get N2 was a welding supply house. (besides mail-order.)
6 GHz is not that impressive. by reporter · 2004-09-25 12:44 · Score: 4, Interesting

At 6 GHz, the only applications that can show appreciable performance improvement are CPU-bound ones. Hence, a program that sits entirely in the on-chip cache will show significant improvement. An example of such a program is the one calculating the value of pi.
Memory-bound applications will not show significant improvement. At 6 GHz, most applications become memory bound since memory becomes extremely slow in responding to the 6 GHz processor.
Has anyone liquid cooled the G5 and the Opteron driven them to 6 GHz? I bet that the G5 could crush the Pentium in performance since the G5 has a powerful floating point unit.
1. Re:6 GHz is not that impressive. by Stickerboy · 2004-09-25 16:49 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Has anyone liquid cooled the G5 and the Opteron driven them to 6 GHz? I bet that the G5 could crush the Pentium in performance since the G5 has a powerful floating point unit.
  
  Your geek license has just been revoked.
  
  The overall design idea behind the P4 was to stretch out the pipeline to an insane level in order to ramp up clockspeeds to an insane level.
  
  No one's liquid cooled a G5 or an Opteron and overclocked it to 6 GHz. Why? Because their design matched with current chip fabbing technology can't handle it.
  
  The good news for AMD and PowerPC fanboys is that they won't need to get it to 6 GHz. If someone overclocks an Athlon 64 to, oh, 4 GHz or so (which would be impressive enough), the Athlon, which is designed to accomplish more clock for clock than the P4, should shred the 6 GHz P4 in performance.
  
  --
  Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Re:Erm... by anthonyclark · 2004-09-25 12:45 · Score: 4, Interesting

speaking of gentoo; What I'd like to see would be a benchmark 'emerge system' or bootstrap.sh. One run should be on a single proc system with MAKEOPTS="-j2". The other should be on a system with dual processors at half the speed of the first system, with MAKEOPTS="-j3".

I ran something like this a while back; a dual p3-500 just about matched a single p4-1.5.

With some "real" benchmarks, we'd at least be able to weigh this 6GHz beast against a dual 3GHz beast...

--
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
Speed of light by ppswede · 2004-09-25 13:23 · Score: 2, Interesting

One step closer the maximum clock-speed of a single-cpu core, which probably should be pretty soon, if I'm correct? 6GHz means each clock cycle has 1/6*10^9th of a second to stabilize and reach every part of the chip that is affected.. with the speed of light, at roughly 3*10^8 m/s this means with this clockspeed, each cycle have time to travel roughly 5mm on the chip. I'm not a chip-engineer, but isn't this almost near the limit?
Re:Don't forget the dual clocked ALU by Aadain2001 · 2004-09-25 13:24 · Score: 5, Interesting

Actually, the ALU's in Prescott don't even use a clock! It uses self resetting domino logic, so the speed is completely based on the manufacturing process and the speed of the transistors. Damn hard things to make, even harder to formally verify that they will always work, and as far as I know Intel is the only CPU manufacturer in the world to use something like this in a mass-produced product. So you can really say that the ALU is working at >12GHz or whatever since it isn't clocked. Oh, and Intel has been measuring their operation time in picoseconds for a while now ;)

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What's that plugged in the DIMM slot? by PipsqueakOnAP133 · 2004-09-25 13:40 · Score: 3, Interesting

So in the "icing" link, I see a mobo with 4 DIMM slots. One's got a DIMM with heatsinks. The other appears to have an LED segment display and a pair of molex connectors to what looks like a DIMM.

What is that?
Re:Erm... by evilviper · 2004-09-25 16:25 · Score: 2, Interesting

In all seriousness, this is pretty amazing, but I can't really see the usefulness.

Since when is usefulness all there is to life?

Can you see the usefulness in climbing Everest, running around in a circle several times at the Olympics, or anything else?

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Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Re:calculate pi... by NonSequor · 2004-09-25 16:36 · Score: 4, Interesting

Actually, he could be serious. There's a very simple formula for any arbitrary digit of pi in base 16.

--
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Re:calculate pi... by einhverfr · 2004-09-25 17:43 · Score: 3, Interesting

I have been looking into this and it doesn;t work for arbitrary digits of pi, at least not as a simple formula fur such. The problem is that you have an infinite sum of fractions multiplied by 16 to a negative power.

So, you still have much computational work to do...

--

LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I wonder why... by syukton · 2004-09-25 18:37 · Score: 4, Interesting

I wonder why people are more inclined to use something temporary like a liquid nitrogen bath, instead of keeping the LN2 cool with a stirling cryocooler. I mean, sure, a 6 gigahertz computer is neat and all, but what use is it if you can't take it to a LAN party?

I'm not too familiar with the terminology used in the cooling world, but 15 watts of cooling power at 77 kelvin (-196 deg C / -321 deg F) sounds like quite a bit of cooling power to me. I've often wondered why Stirling technology isn't used in air conditioners.

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Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Re:Erm... by ZeNTuRe · 2004-09-25 18:46 · Score: 2, Interesting

I have 3 Dual P2-300MHz boxes (6*300MHz total), and using distcc or bruteforcing with john they beat a 3.4GHz P4.

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Did they touch God or did they touch the Sun?