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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."
-erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
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
: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
So P4's double clock their ALUs - that means that ALU is shifting at > 12GHz.
Welcome to measuring your operations in picoseconds.
Just to figure out the answer to a problem every 8th grader knows.
Open Source Sushi
With winter coming and the price of oil approaching $50, you can now safely turn off your heater and just point the vent of your 6Ghz P4 into the middle of the room...or maybe run a venting system off of it connected to the heat ducts in your house...
ok, yes, doom 3 has some pretty high sys requirements to run smoothly, but isn't this going a wee bit overboard?
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Look how fast I can calculate pi:
3.1415927
wow, that was fast.
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
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...
I think we need to stop making our computers go so fast. We're only making things easier for Skynet.
GE/S/P a- e++ y-- r-- s:++ d+ h! X+++ t++ C+ P+ L++ E W++ w M-- V? PS+ P+
their scroll bar works faster than yours.
Say hello to my little sig.
I hope it's a substantial improvement over my machine... Seems like I've been waiting forever for it to finish...
but don't worry I got a copy.
3.
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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.
mmmMMMMmmmm Pi
*drooling* aggghhhhhh
You know what? people who say "they have way too much time on their hands" or "how do they have the time to do that" .. REALLY piss me off
.. Browsing slashdot .. how come you have time to do that? Like what exactly do you do with YOUR time? I dont see you being the CEO of a major corp or contributing anything to society.
Cause just about always, people who say that never did a damn progressive thing ever in their life. It's just a lame excuse underacheivers make trying to pull down those who are out there making stuff happen.
Look at yourself first
As the AC already said, it's not stable at 6Ghz, from the article:
:)
Not bench stable - just a screenshot record
The CPU powersupply seems to require quite a bit of modding in order to bench past 5.4GHz.
Now just imagine it - an 8 CPU powered box with each CPU running at 3.2 (rated) overclocked to 6.4 GHz = 51.2 GHz with a exabyte of Hard drive space. The ultimate BeOS machine - just wondering if anyone would consider building one :).
In other news, Microsoft increases Longhorn's recommended requirements to 7GHz.
What's this LN2 stuff... everyone knows REAL overclockers use liquid helium surrounded by a vaccum flask with another LN2 flask outside of it. (P.S. That's the setup they use to cool NMR machines for chemistry that have superconducting magnets in them)
Waitaminute, waitaminute, waitaminute! They timed how long it took to calculate PI? That implies that it *FINISHED* calculating pi!
Now, THAT's "News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters"
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
It would take a HUGE fan to keep it from overheating and causing a board shutdown or a processor meltdown.
I've got a 3.02 ghz, mildly overclocked, and the fan shutting down and the board automatically shutting down due to high heat are nearly simultaneous.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It *might* be Pi they are calculating in that screenshot, but heck, what does "Laskenta Alkaa" means?
/.!
God I hate screenshots in a language I can't understand.
Typical finnish, first they take over the only FPS ever worth playing (aq2), now they're taking over
I think the LN2 is cold enough to crack the pleats in my good wool skirt
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
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**
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!
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
I can remember every single digit, just perhaps not in the right order.
So Deus Ex IW will run at a smooth 60 FPS now?
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?
Actually no, It would overheat quite quickly as a vaccuum is a very good insulator (heh some would say almost perfect).
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
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?
Why on earth would they go to the expense of an LN2 based system when they could just open a few windows.
Mozy, free online backup service
--
I wish I hadn't blown my modpoints. Nobody should get modpoints for a post in which they use the phrase 'preppies'. Most of the world's not highschool. I just hope that you're still in HS and not some 30yr old that still hasn't gotten over it.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Looks like one of these doodads to me:
c z-booster.html
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/o
Liquid nitrogen boils at -195.8 degrees C, which is cold enough to freeze propane into a solid (there's a fun experiment for you). Further, liquid nitrogen is not flammable, and presents no hazards other than asphyxiation and freeze damage. Nitrogen already makes up 80% of the air we breathe, so unless one works in an enclosed space with plenty of NL2 boiling off, it's tough to die from asphyxiation.
In other words, LN2 is colder, and won't blow up on you. I've used it for years, and have yet to get hurt by it. A little respect goes a long way.
I, for one, welcome our new, liquid nitrogen-cooled, 6 Ghz overlords! (...and I'm not even an Intel fan...)
What you missed is the P4 runs on a 200Mhz FSB x4. 333 x4 with an 18x multplier gets your roughly 6Ghz.
Radiation is not nearly as efficient as conductiion hence the need for so many fins on a heat sink. So I still think it would overheat extremely fast.
I think you'll find that the fins are to increase surface area for the purposes of convection. Convection of course dominates radiative transfers in a fluid like air.
As for radiative cooling in space, a quick ball park calculation is quite educational:
Objects emit radiation depending on their temperature, according to Stefan's law. They also absorb radiation from their surroundings according to the same equation, hence we can express the following formula for net power emitted as
P_net = {sigma}*A*e*(T^4 - T_0^4)
Here {sigma} is the stefan-boltzmann constant, 5.67e-8 W/(M^2*K^4), A the surface area of the object. T is the temperature of the object, and T_0 that of the background. e is the emissivity of the object, which we will assume to be 1 (perfect blackbody).
I saw a photo of the thermometer displaying -46 deg C(=227 K), and standard Pentium 4 3GHz apparently consume about 80 watts of power. We'll therefore assume that the madly overclocked P4 produces 200W of heat. The question is then, what area of radiator is required to maintain the chip's temperature, given that the temperature of deep space is about 3K (cosmic background radiation)?
A = P_net / ( {sigma} *(T^4 - T_0^4) )
= 200 / (5.67e-8 * (230^4 - 3^4) )
~= 1.3 m^2
An area of 1.3 m^2 corresponds to a sphere of radius 30cm. Conclusion: Put the chip in good thermal contact with a well-emitting sphere big enough to contain the chip and motherboard, and it'll probably be fine.
Yeah, it's not the preppies buying them. It's the lazy kid's parents buying them! The preppies are more concerned with how they look, OTOH the rich little snob kid likes how pretty his machine is and blames his gaming skill on lag.
I wrote a paper on Type I superconductivity (appears in metals when cooled to a few K of zero; ceramics are a totally different beastie) in school and got diverted into reading up on ultracryogenics for a few weeks - apparently at temps that low, you get all sorts of problems like extreme brittleness and differing rates of thermal expansion, the latter being a fairly major issue in designing an ultracryogenic system. There's a good chance the CPU die, wires, and case would all tear away from each other and destroy the thing. Not to mention that lead superconducts at 7.196K; i wonder what resistanceless solder would do to a mobo...
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
A vaccuum is a very good insulator... Fortunately, space isn't even remotely a perfect vaccuum.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Akhem, er, excuse me, if I could have everyone's attention... would you all please listen, If you could just... Pi is exactly 3!
never drink kool-aid from a big vat
Gad, it's running on a windows box. Those numbers can't be trusted.
The problem with liquid helium (This made MRI scanners horribly impractical for a LOT of years) is that it has 1/20 the heat capacity of nitrogen, and you have to suck a thousand times the power to get down to helium temperatures compared to nitrogen. There would also be no quantum anomalies with silicon. It can only be compelled to a superconductive state under Extreme pressure.
:)
BTW, which is it... are we mounting it in a vaccuum or under liquid helium
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.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I do know enough about number systems to derive my own conversion mechanisms. So yes, I know what base 16 digits are, thank you very much.
It is possible that we are talking about different things. I think of a digit extractor as something which will let you calculate the nth digit without having to calculate any other digits.
Mathworld mistakenly called this equasion a "digit extraction algorythm" and this is a mistake IMO because the equasion still requires that you calculate every preceding digit. This is because the portion of the equasion before the (1/(16^x)) will not produce whole numbers, even in hex. The numbers are less than 0 and therefore must be calculated before the next digit. Does this make sense?
The problem is that for any value of x where x > 0, 4/(8x+1) - 2/(8x+4) - 1/(8x+5) - 1/(8x+6) always yields a fraction whose denominator is *not* a power of 2 and hence not a power of 16. So you end up with a value which does not exactly correspond to any single digit in pi (even in hex).
Now this equasion is very helpful because I could write a program to calculate n digits of pi in hex and speed things up by shifting values off when they are no longer needed for active calculation. But it will *not* allow me to calculate the thirty-four billion 396 millionth decimal of pi without calculating all prior places.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP