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Overclockers Top 6GHz With A 3.6GHz-Rated P4

Posted by timothy on 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."

5 of 421 comments (clear)

  1. 6 GHz is not that impressive. by reporter · · 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.

  2. Re:Erm... by anthonyclark · · 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.
  3. Re:Don't forget the dual clocked ALU by Aadain2001 · · 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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  4. Re:calculate pi... by NonSequor · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

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    My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
  5. I wonder why... by syukton · · 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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