Pentium 4 Overclocked to 7.1GHz, Sets World Record

Netmonger writes "This Japanese guy overclocked a Pentium 4 to 7.132GHz!! The system managed to calculate pi to 1 million decimal places in 18.516 seconds, setting the world's record." The article notes that a Pentium 4 had been overclocked faster earlier this year, but at that speed it was not possible for the machine to function beyond BIOS. Of course, they'd yet to try diverting power from the dilthium crystal reactor to the deflector array.

Comments

World record?

[bcmm]

World record for the P4 or for a single x86 processor?

Re:World record?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

He overclocked the Intel Pentium 4 670 processor with stock speed of 3.80GHz.

The processor system bus was overclocked to 1520MHz.

processor's voltage was pumped up to 1.70V, significantly higher than default setting; memory latency settings were CL4 3-3-4, memory voltage was set to 2.3V.

Still no word on what his 3dmark2005 score was! (CPU and Total, of course)

Re:World record?

[68K]

Exactly. I'm sure there are many supercomputers out there that can smoke this P4.

Re:World record?

[ArbitraryConstant]

They have lots of processors, but I'm not sure any individual element has a clock speed that high.

Re:World record?

[PsychicX]

My question is this. Tom's Hardware put a P4 under liquid nitrogen a while ago, put the northbridge chipset under a phase change compressor, and replaced the motherboard power converter in order to supply enough power to the chips, and they were only able to achieve 5.25GHz max. What did this japanese guy do different that gained him another 2.5 GHz? Is it entirely a result of using newer chips with new manufacturing technologies like Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI)? Or did this japan guy do something that Tom's didn't?

Re:World record?

[bcmm]

The system managed to calculate pi to 1 million decimal places in 18.516 seconds, setting the world's record

The OP suggested that it's a record for calculating Pi, not just for clock speed. That's not for computers in general, obviously, and probably not for single processors either unless you set restrictions on what counts as one processor (one x86 processor with no multi-core technology?).

Re:World record?

[magarity]

Calculating pi is a series of mathematical operations where you can't do the next one without the prior because you need the remainders. Supercomputers are super due to a heck of a lot of CPUs all working on different parts of a problem that can be broken into chunks. How exactly do you break a series of operations that depend on the priors into chunks for a supercomputer to rip through? So anyway, it looks like this calculating pi is a record in general, not for just a PC. It's a speed job for a single CPU.

Re:World record?

[cms108]

i suppose it could be a world record for calculating pi... even including supercomputers.

dunno if there's an algorithm for calculating pi that lends itself to the parallel processing approach used in supercomputers. i could check. but i'm lazy.

Re:World record?

[keesh]

Not true. You can get any digit in base 16 of pi without needing to know any other digit. This means you can get groups of digits in any base by only calculating a relatively small (maximum 16 * base) number of other digits in base 16 and converting.

Re:World record?

[pooly7]

That's not exactly true, you can compute the Nth binary digit of PI without the need of the previous one. Here is the guy who discover it : http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/pi/

Re:World record?

[BurntNickel]

Calculating pi is a series of mathematical operations where you can't do the next one without the prior because you need the remainders.

That's not entirely true. There exists a digit-extraction algorithm for computing pi starting at the nth digit, without the need to compute any other digits. The only catch is that it only works on base 16.

Re:World record?

[wfberg]

Calculating pi is a series of mathematical operations where you can't do the next one without the prior because you need the remainders. Supercomputers are super due to a heck of a lot of CPUs all working on different parts of a problem that can be broken into chunks. How exactly do you break a series of operations that depend on the priors into chunks for a supercomputer to rip through?

Use the BBP Formula. Pifast is just a benchark, like all benchmarks it's rather silly. The record is for PCs, the top 500 supercomputers are benchmarked using another silly benchmark (LINPACK).

Re:World record?

[MoonBuggy]

I'm probably being very dumb here, but how come many machines on the pi_css5 page are doing it significantly faster than this? Is the method used in that program innacurate in some way?

Re:World record?

[shawnce]

Likely "world record" in the same way that the hole in the wall, crappy food, taco place down the street is "world famous". ;-)

Re:World record?

[Anonymous Coward]

My Powerbook G4 using Mathematica can compute Pi to 1000000 places in about 19 seconds. How can this be any kind of record, or anything to write home about.

Since mathematica's performance for this algorithm is directly related to clock speed, I'd expect to see something like 3 seconds for that clock speed, and even faster for optimised code

Re:World record?

[macdaddy357]

Soon, ordinary CPUs will have this kind of horsepower, but people will use them only to surf the net, read e-mail, and type letters. It won't be killing a fly with a bazooka. It will be killing a fly with a nookyoler warhead!

Re:World record?

[arose]

World record for the hotest known object.

Re:World record?

[mindwar]

it all depends on the program used. you cant actualy compare results from too difrent pi calc programs. even the same program with diffrent patches come up with diffrent results

Re:World record?

[ArcticCelt]

"The system managed to calculate pi to 1 million decimal places in 18.516 seconds"

...but still took 25 to open an Adobe Acrobat document!

Re:World record?

[Zarel]

18.5 seconds? A record for calculating pi? My computer can calculate pi in less than a second, simply by typing http://www.solidz.com/pi/pi-1million.php into my web browser and pressing Enter.

Re:World record?

[baadger]

Thats nothing I can search the first 200 million digits of pi by going to http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery ..all on the PII i have in the corner...aint I something? :)

Re:World record?

[cperciva]

Calculating pi is a series of mathematical operations where you can't do the next one without the prior because you need the remainders.

Leaving aside the BBP algorithm which several other people have mentioned, you're mostly correct here.

How exactly do you break a series of operations that depend on the priors into chunks for a supercomputer to rip through?

But you're going a bit astray here. Large classical computations of Pi are exercises in performing big Fast Fourier Transforms; and there are very good algorithms for doing those in parallel. Using the AGM or a Borwein iteration, computing a million digits of Pi requires approximately 200 full-length FFTs plus some additional linear-time trivially parallelizable work.

So anyway, it looks like this calculating pi is a record in general, not for just a PC.

Give me a 4 processor 3.8GHz Pentium 4 system, and I can beat the reported time by a factor of two. If you can do parallel FFTs, you can do a parallel classical computation of Pi.

Re:World record?

[baadger]

Maybe you should rip the drive out of that PPro200 or something and..like..look into an exorcist for the other other one.

Re:World record?

[davidphogan74]

This PC is probably about the final minimum specs of what Windows Vista will require.

Re:World record?

[Taladar]

I don't think it was a yes/no question.

Re:World record?

[jmak]

Certainly not even for a single CPU. Performance of SuperPI (using Gauss-Legendre series) sucks by today's standards in comparison to the programs using Chudnovsky elliptic curve algorithm. QuickPI spits out 1 million digits in about 5 seconds on an Athlon-XP.

Re:World record?

[root_42]

Yes, but you still cannot do it in constant time. To compute the nth digit in base 10, you need at least quadratic time. So adding more CPUs to the calculation of Pi does not necessarily scale well.

Re:World record?

[ikkonoishi]

I know you are joking, but try adobe liposuction

It worked for me. I can open a pdf in less than the time it takes a politician to go from idealistic young upstart to corporate whore.

Re:World record?

[kesuki]

or course it doesn't scale well.

quite frankly intel was supposed to be selling 6-7 ghz p4's around now... the fact that they can't but can be overclocked that fast is proof that the architecture was designed to run at those clock speeds, but that actually implementing that kind of clock speed would require insane cooling and power requirements that most sane people find unacceptable.

Re:World record?

[suitepotato]

They started Adobe Premiere on it yesterday and it is just about finished loading the plug-ins. That's record speed there.

Re:World record?

[Abreu]

Yeah, but it will still take 10-20 seconds to open a pdf document, or even MS Word

Re:World record?

[pomo monster]

What the hell? How about replying to correct him instead? Or if you absolutely must flex your mod muscles, how about using "overrated"? And finally, didn't you just nullify your mod by posting to this article?

Re:World record?

[hunterx11]

Even my crappy Macintosh can copy a file in 17 minutes instead of 20.

Re:World record?

[brsmith4]

LINPACK is silly... but I would say that it's not quite as silly as this PI benchmark (although HPL is way too customizable for anyone's good). Given a hand-tweaked HPL.dat file, you can make even the most paultry cluster appear to perform quite well. Of course, that's the point in that you would like to create a problem similar to your main day-to-day tasks on your cluster (HPL.dat allows this) and see how fast it will run.

Top500 is kind of dubious as well given that each cluster runs its own customized HPL inputs. The list places in order a number of clusters that are really good at doing one particular thing and compares them as if they are doing the same thing. It seems rather bizzare, though that particular model for rating performance appears to have worked out rather well over the years.

Re:World record?

[CardiganKiller]

I think the government is involved in PI. I found my two phone numbers and my last name converted to ascii in there.

Re:World record?

[fireman sam]

Ah, I hate to tell you but politicians are always corporate whores.

Re:World record?

[gardyloo]

Agreed that it's kind of silly. While reading the /. abstract, I said, "Hm... I wonder how long this computer (2GHz Centrino laptop) would take." It took 8.72 seconds to calculate Pi to a million decimal places, and display them (which always takes longer than anything else, it seems), using the Chudnovsky formula http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PiFormulas.html, in Mathematica 5.1.
    I did not RTFA (I'm not new here), but might, since I want to know what slow-ass implementation this guy used to calculate that.

Re:World record?

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I believe that since version 7, you don't need to do this since it does start up faster (I think it loads plugins on demand or something). It still works kind of sluggish though!

Re:World record?

[Seumas]

Who cares? Either way it's only about 700% faster than my $3,300 17" Powerbook.

Dear god, x86 based OSX can't come fast enough.

Re:World record?

[BroncoInCalifornia]

Acrobat for Linux loads a lot faster than Acrobat for Windows!

( I will probobly get modded down for "off topic". Well there goes my Karma!

Re:World record?

[Wolfier]

Even without the BBP algorithm or FFT, parallizing Pi calculation is a piece of cake - in fact, it is embarrassingly parallel using a Monte Carlo approach.

Here's how: drop random dots in a 1x1 square and then estimate the number of dots within the insribing circle.

Pi = 4 * (number of dots in circle) / (total number of dots)

Different computers can drop dots all by themselves and PI calculated using a combined sum.

It converges very slowly but very scalable nonetheless.

Re:World record?

[MarkCollette]

I work at a company called ICEsoft Technologies, on the ICEpdf team. We just use our own PDF viewer instead of waiting for Acrobat Reader.

You can grab the trial download of the cross-platform Java viewer application for free. It says it's for 30 days, but there is no time limit anymore.

http://www.icesoft.com/products/icepdf.html

And your registration email address is completely confidential.

Re:World record?

[KillerDeathRobot]

No, doing this still opens the program dramatically faster in version 7.

Re:World record?

[msully4321]

Where have you been? This is Slashdot, any positive comment about Linux is +5 insightful.

Re:World record?

[heinousjay]

Wow, you live by that place? That must be pretty cool.

Re:World record?

[BroncoInCalifornia]

I'm sure it does, since it doesn't exist.

You can download it from here. They have it in RPM and tarball form.

Re:World record?

[Chrispy1000000 the 2]

There's just one problem with this. How does the computer define the boundrary of the circle, when it uses a finite lengh pi. Unless you make the computer use the current value for lim --> pi, and just keeps recalculating the entire thing without eraseing any co-ords... Now we're cooking!

Re:World record?

[Auri]

Ship it! --- Geek Your Ride! The Book. - http://www.geekmyride.net/

Re:World record?

[OsirisX11]

Foxit PDF viewer is light.

Re:World record?

[Wolfier]

Hm. Obviously you have not thought enough before posting.

The calculation does not make use of Pi at all. A dot is in the boundary of the circle if the distance to the centre is = 0.5.

Better retake highschool math.

Re:World record?

[Wolfier]

"<=" 0.5.  Time to change /. preference...

Re:World record?

[fatphil]

Read up on Kanada's super-computer pi-calculating exploits.
The state of the art is nearly 2 generations beyond anything that is done on PCs.

Re:World record?

[rbk]

A world record??? LOL! Maybe for their lame implementation! Others are faster: http://packages.debian.org/stable/math/pi. Try for yourself, using a Debian box:
$ apt-get install pi
$ time pi 1000000 > /tmp/pi

real 0m9.188s
user 0m9.048s
sys 0m0.141s
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 5
model name : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 250
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 2405.538
cache size : 1024 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext lm 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips : 4718.59
TLB size : 1088 4K pages
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp

But.,.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it run... OSX86 ?

Retep Vosnul

Re:But.,.

[uberdave]

Ah! Witness the emergence of a new Slashdot catchphrase.

Re:But.,.

[JourneyExpertApe]

Retep Vosnul? Somehow I don't think that'll catch on. What does it even mean, anyway?

Re:But.,.

[seanvaandering]

Yeah but in Soviet Russia, OSX86 runs you!

Re:But.,.

[youknowmewell]

Slashdot doesn't need anymore catchphrases you insensitive clod!

Slashdot memes

[afd8856]

Getting ready for DNF?

or:

Couldn't get Vista Beta to boot?

Re:Slashdot memes

[WilliamSChips]

Longhor--er, Vista has a red screen of death now.

Prove it

[Danborg]

Paste all the numbers here for verification please.

Re:Prove it

[IdleTime]

1.8465662757375

How 'bout that?

That's cool but

[notque]

How long can the machine last at that sort of overclocking? How much experience have others had with lifetimes of chips once you overclock them by a lot.

Re:That's cool but

[Tx]

Fried a P4 1.8 running it at way over the recommended voltage for several months. But I doubt that guy is planning to run that thing constantly at 7.1GHz. He's got the bragging rights now.

Re:That's cool but

[alragh]

About 18.516 seconds by the looks of things

Re:That's cool but

[PhYrE2k2]

But why one million... Why not two or more? I'd guess it didn't last as long as you might imagine (especially if you have the speed test at 18 seconds, why not do a second run for longer?

-M

Re:That's cool but

[RipTides9x]

I kept a 1.0A Tualatin Celeron overclocked to 1.33Ghz for over 4 years running 24/7. (100Mhz FSB set @133). The only downtime was for cleaning/dusting of components. In order to get my overclock I, of course, had to crank the voltage up. But I had no problems with it running for so long on nothing more than a mundane aluminium Volcano7 HSF.

With todays procs such an overclock might get a stifiled yawn from most people. But at the time that was pretty significant. I was limited from pushing it further only by the type of RAM I was running. In retrospect exotic ram and cooling would have probably let me push it alot further.

The Tualatins were the most hardy and mature of the P3 line. Their life in the marketplace was cut short by the fact that clock for clock they could run circles around the first gen of Pentium4's running RDRam. Intel saw the writing on the wall, and not wanting to compete with itself, plans to take the Tualatins all the way to 2Ghz using DDR-Ram (rumored) were scrapped.

In the end its not the processor that failed but the motherboard. Seems that pushing a system so far for so long does has its limitations. I was in the middle of transferring files from that computer over to another when the Tualatin system critical BSOD'd on me. Upon reboot I could still get into bios, but I quickly discovered it was a fatal BSOD, as both my IDE channels were gone. I could have easily got a non-Intel based replacement mobo, but there was no point in it as I was entrenched into the Athlon craze and had moved on several generations by that point.

I ended up harvesting and parting out all the usable components, except for the processor itself, and old blue (named for its clear blue case) now resides, collecting dust, in my parents basement.

Re:That's cool but

[nofx_3]

The Taulatin was in part reborn as the Pentium M (which I am using right now). The way I understand it Intel streched the pipeline in order to increase the clock speed of the Pentium 4 (for marketing reasons) but even with sophisticated branch prediction, if a mistake was made it had to go alllll the way back to the begining of the pipeline and use a different instruction which caused the slowdown compared to similarly clocked PIII's. Only by getting more cycles per clock were that able to make up the difference but this required increased power consumption and resulted in a huge increase in heat dissapation which ultimately doomed the P4 from super high clocks that it was intended to achive.
 
IMHO the Pentium M (glorified PIII with SSE if I understand) is a far superior architechture. Sure it won't reach rediculously high clock speeds, but my 1.8 feels snappier in most cases than my P4 3.0 and is much cooler and less power hungry.
 
-kaplanfx
 
This CPU lesson has been brought to you by the number 3!

Re:That's cool but

[timeOday]

How much experience have others had with lifetimes of chips once you overclock them by a lot.

I bought a Bh6 motherboard and Celeron 300a processor to overclock to 450 mhz (I don't remember when, but it wasn't this century). Ran that for a few years, then upgraded just the CPU to a C566 overclocked to 850mhz with the same mobo/ram. It run 24/7 in my living room. It's a router, my kids' desktop machine (at the moment running Flash games), and multimedia server (pvr/mp3) for the entertainment console.

Granted not extreme like in this story, but it's a 50% overclock, and obviously nobody has 6-7 years running current hardware this way.

Re:That's cool but

[Barbarian]

FPU on my k6-2 350 would break down and give errors (errors in 80 bit float precision) after about 15 minutes when running at 375. I imagine people have similar problems all the time with overclocking, but it is usually missed (the problems were on the 10th significant digit or so).

Jesse James' calculator??

[gearmonger]

Calculating Pi is good...but what FPS can it do in Battlefield 2?

Re:Jesse James' calculator??

[bcmm]

The bottleneck would be the graphics card, not the processor, of course.

Re:Jesse James' calculator??

[PePeBoTiKa]

software rendering? would be an interesting benchmark

Re:Jesse James' calculator??

[Ravadill]

BF2 dosn't support software rendering, it requires pixel shader 1.2 in hardware, much to the annoyance of owners of older video cards.

Re:Jesse James' calculator??

[HogynCymraeg]

I heard he managed to install gentoo in 23.5 hours!

In related news..

[leathered]

Overclocking experiment results in largest single release of thermal energy in Japan since 1945.

Casualty figures as yet unknown.

Re:In related news..

[pwroberts]

Some tasteful moderation there by whoever modded the parent "Flamebait"... ;-)

Re:In related news..

[Skiron]

lol

Re:In related news..

[base3]

No shit. What the hell do we have here? Kamikaze moderators from the Imperial Japanese Air Force? Or a bunch of humorless fucking politically correct gits? Hard to tell. Anyways, I laughed my ass off. And no apologies to the simpering whiners out there who think I shouldn't.

Re:In related news..

[pallmall1]

Modded flamebait? The only flamebait I see is a pentium running at 7.1 GHz! I hope those folks had a fire extinguisher nearby at all times. :)

Re:In related news..

[base3]

Whine, whine, whine, cry, cry, cry. It was 60 years ago, people deal with tragedy through humor, and no one appointed you chief censor for the world. Get over yourself.

Re:In related news..

[Anonymous Coward]

REALLY FUNNY considering we just had the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Perhaps you want to joke about the Jewish holocaust or the slaughter of the Native American indians.

Re:In related news..

[systemic chaos]

You wouldn't know unless you were working in japan or if your remote came within 3 channels of the Discovery Channel, because they have a few specials about it and they have been advertising the living Hirohito out of them.

Re:In related news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the two bombs dropped on Japan saved more lives, both American and Japanese, than they killed I find the comparisons to the holocaust and Indian slaughter to be simply ignorant of history. There were more lives lost in the fire bombings in Europe, but I don't see anybody complaining about that. It was an ugly war that was thankfully brought to an end.

You should really use your head for more than a hat rack.

Re:In related news..

[Xabraxas]

REALLY FUNNY considering we just had the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Perhaps you want to joke about the Jewish holocaust or the slaughter of the Native American indians.

It is really funny. Hell I even joke about the holocaust and Native American slaughter. Guess what, so do my Jewish and Native American friends. If you don't have a sense of humor then I pity you.

I'm about as liberal as can be but I absolutely hate political correctness. It doesn't help anyone, it just gives some jerkoffs the opportunity to complain about trivial shit. If you really want to complain about something try taking a stab at shit that is going on now and affecting us now like the criminals in office and their illegal war, illegal torture, and illegal detention.

Re:In related news..

[base3]

Well aren't you brave, Miss Anonymous pussy. I hope you enjoy saying things to people online that would get your sorry little ass kicked if you dared to utter them in person. But please give it a try in real life and let us all know how that goes for you.

Re:In related news..

[FidelCatsro]

I too laughed so hard i nearly fell of my chair , but the other part of my brain was saying "If the christians are right.. Then im going to hell(not bloody likely) && that is rather sick"
So i will have my cake and eat it , +5 funnybait please

Re:In related news..

[joNDoty]

One of my relatives died in the holocaust. It was a horrible, humiliating way to die -- he fell out of the guard tower.

So please, don't ever joke about the holocaust.

Re:In related news..

[leathered]

REALLY FUNNY considering we just had the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Perhaps you want to joke about the Jewish holocaust or the slaughter of the Native American indians.

Now joking about the Holocaust is one thing I will NOT do, especially since my grandfather died in a Nazi concentration camp.

In hindsight though, if he wasn't so drunk, maybe he wouldn't have fallen out of the guard tower.

I'm on a roll with these un-PC jokes today. Next..

Re:In related news..

[base3]

I can totally relate. I have "I'm going to Hell" moments all the time, and that was one of them. Another one was when I laughed at this joke (not based on a true story, I hope) when a friend told it to me.

Re:In related news..

[leathered]

Nooo, you beat me to it!

Anyway, we've gone and killed the camp guard joke now. RIP and may it never darken /. again.

Re:In related news..

[Mozk]

I'm wondering why the summary refers to him as Japanese. Why the hell does it matter? I bet if he were from the United States it wouldn't say anything about his nationality.

Re:In related news..

[WilliamSChips]

Because Japan is teh (insert Japanese equivalent of "super" here)AWESOME!

Re:In related news..

[RichardX]

You -might- be able to make a case that Hiroshima saved lives by scaring the shit out of the Japanese, causing them to surrender, but visibly dropping an A-bomb on somewhere less inhabited may well have achieved the same thing with no loss of civillian life. Especially as the Japanese were teetering on the verge of winding things down anyways.

Nagasaki, on the other hand, there was no excuse for. It was 3 days later. Hiroshima had certainly done it's job, and the Japanese had all the fight taken out of them. I fail to see any possible justification for the bombing of Nagasaki.

Re:In related news..

[birge]

Oh come on. It's so easy to excuse bad behavior by just claiming to do otherwise is politically correct. That's a cop out. Political correctness is when useful dialogue is stifled by group think. Not making jokes about Hiroshima is just about not being a complete insensitive asshole. You have to judge your civility by the feelings of others, not yourself, otherwise it's kind of pointless.

Just because you find it funny (and I have no problem with that) doesn't mean everybody should. Claiming knowledge of a few jews who joke about the holocaust is about the stupidest reason to excuse public joking about it. I know people who like to have others shit on their chest, but I assume you'd take offense if I came over and took a steamer on you. Would it make a difference if I said "Look, you politically correct prude, I know people who love this! So just shut up and take the poop."

I'm sick of people who act as if anything can be a public joke and anybody who disagrees is a prude. If you think that kind of stuff is funny (as do I), great. Tell jokes with your friends. But not everybody finds it funny, and you're stupid if you don't know that, and insensitive if you do. My guess is people who lost parents in Hiroshima don't find it funny. So, not making public jokes is really about being considerate, something I hope hasn't gone out of style.

Re:In related news..

[dubious9]

You apparently don't know much about the surrender of Japan. Even after the bombs there was a *lot* of the opposition by the military against the surrender even to the point of having the Emperor under de facto house arrest. The surrender recording was done clandestine, and was hidden when the military showed up searching for it.

So yes, there was opposition against surrender, in the form of an attemped coup even after Nagasaki. It is certainly *not* clear that they would have surrendered if they would have dropped it over the ocean, or stoped after Hiroshima. To think otherwise is naive and ignorant of Japanese will power at the time.

Re:In related news..

[dubious9]

I hate to reply to myself but I thought I'd conceed that the bombs were definately not *good* things and the justification behind their use is not clear. Wikipedia has a great write up of the argument pro and con at here and some more background on the end of the war here.

Re:In related news..

[McGiraf]

no, nobody ever complained of being bombed ...

I'm sure they all agreed to it.

pfff

Re:In related news..

[Tackhead]

> > Overclocking experiment results in largest single release of thermal energy in Japan since 1945.
> >
> > Casualty figures as yet unknown.
>
> Some tasteful moderation there by whoever modded the parent "Flamebait"... ;-)

No, that goes to the some guy named Harris who overclocked an AMD CPU in Dresden. *zzzzing!*

/is it hot in here or what?

Note: To everyone complaining about this thread -- have you never driven a Toyota to the grocery store, then come home to grill some Bratwurst, and wash it down with a pint of Guinness? Maybe everybody won World War II.

Re:In related news..

[isorox]

Although I probably wouldn't have known if I weren't working in Japan.

Or watching/reading international news, or reading slashdot like the two sites you linked to?

Re:In related news..

[stimpleton]

Ok, you'll love this then.... In any converstion where Sept 11 is mentioned, I urge you you to say:

"Ah, September 11, the day that the song "its rainng men" came to fruition".

Re:In related news..

[seriesrover]

Also worth noting that the destruction of the A-bomb brough was previously unfathomable.

From a military perspective Hiroshima proved the concept of the A-bomb and its effects. Nagasaki proved 2 things - a) that it wasn't some kind of "fluke" or one off scientific anomally, and b) that the Americans were prepared to drop another one, despite the Japanese trying to call their bluff.

That said, it was a horrible waste of lives but the Japanese had numerous chances to not have it happen - either not attacking a non agressive country in the first place, by pulling out after it did, or by not fighting to the death many, many the amount of lives the A-bombs brought would have been saved.

Re:In related news..

[isorox]

400 thousand died in Japan.

Nearer 200,000 from the bombs and aftermarth. The Japanese slaughtered 100,000 civilians in Manilla in 1944, the North Korean's massacred as many in Soeul in 1950, the pakistan army raped 200,000 women - some as young as 8 - in 1971. They killed 3 million. In 1994 a million people were killed in Rwanda. War's a nasty buisness.

Even recently, less than a week after the London bombings which made headline news and killed about 50 people, 73 children and parents were murdered on their way to a primary school in Kenya. Didn't see that one as London (5 days old at this point) was still the main news.

You'd think with so much death in the world we'd have no time to joke about anything, however joking is how many peopel deal with tragedy.

Re:In related news..

[JLF65]

You ARE a prude. This is /. - if you want "considerate" posters, go to www.oldweeniepussies.com. ;)

Re:In related news..

[JLF65]

Heard on those audio tapes of the firemen trapped under the rubble released today: "HQ, can you hear me? It's as hot as an overclocked pentium in here!"

What? Not funny, you say? Flamebait, you say?.. odd how a similar comment about Hiroshima got modded to +5 funny

I thought it was funny. Besides, you haven't been modded down as not funny or flamebait.

Re:In related news..

[Diag]

Because Japan is teh (insert Japanese equivalent of "super" here)AWESOME!

"SUPER-AWESOME!" sounds pretty Japanese to me.

Re:In related news..

[birge]

I don't even want to imagine the kind of pictures I'm going to see on that website. :-) Probably enough to make anybody a prude. Anyway, I don't want considerate posters. I just want posters who don't make light of other people's horrific deaths, especially when there are people around who still remember it. If you can't find comic fodder out there with that modest rule in place, you shouldn't be wasting other's time with your thoughts.

Actually, to be more accurate, I don't mind such posts myself, and have yet to read something on /. that has offended ME. However, I dislike people who are completely full of shit, which the grandparent was. Note that I never bothered to respond to the Japan joke itself, just the guy's pathetic response to people who though it should be modded down.

Re:In related news..

[mysticwhiskey]

Let me tell you, they're not considerate at that site. They post pictures of elderly people's genitals! My eyes!

Re:In related news..

[WilliamSChips]

True, but "Super" is either Latin or Greek.(Don't remember which.) I think there's some native Japanese word that could be used instead, which is probably what a Japan-obsessed /.er would use.

Re:In related news..

[Xabraxas]

Not making jokes about Hiroshima is just about not being a complete insensitive asshole.

That's your opinion and to be perfectly honest I don't give a fuck what you think about me.

You have to judge your civility by the feelings of others, not yourself, otherwise it's kind of pointless.

Isn't that what PC is? If I worried about what everyone else thought then I would never say a god damn thing, and no one else would either. I realized a long time ago that people think shit that they never say all the time and they laugh at shit they never thought they would laugh at all the time too. It doesn't make them horrible people, it makes them human. A true test of a person is their actions anyway, not their words.

Just because you find it funny (and I have no problem with that) doesn't mean everybody should.

Definitely true. If someone says something I find offensive I go somewhere else. I don't hang around places that offend me. You should try it sometime.

But not everybody finds it funny, and you're stupid if you don't know that, and insensitive if you do.

I am insensitive but I don't really care. If you don't find it funny then turn around and walk away. I'm not asking you to conversate with me.

My guess is people who lost parents in Hiroshima don't find it funny

Tell me how many hiroshima survivors do you know on slashdot? How many holocaust survivors do you know on slashdot? It's funny that there is always some unspecified period of time that has to go by until you are allowed to joke about some horrible event and if you are one to break the silence prematurely you are castigated.

Look, it's not like I don't care about what happened in hiroshima or the nazi concentration camps but the fact is there is no one, except sensitive prudes like you, on slashdot that is going to get offended. You're the type of person that lives to get offended so you can complain about it even when it has nothing to do with you. Here's my advice to you, lighten up. Laughter is the best medicine.

Re:In related news..

[birge]

That's your opinion and to be perfectly honest I don't give a fuck what you think about me.

Nor should you. Just give some thought to whether or not I'm right.

Isn't that what PC is? If I worried about what everyone else thought then I would never say a god damn thing, and no one else would either.

No, PC is when people ignore factual reality and claim everybody is equal in ability. PC is when you have to refer to Oriental people as Asians because some oversensitive ex-hippie professor at Swarthmore (who's white) finds it offensive. In general, PC is more about the heightened sensitivities of academics, not the people they are referring to. I was suggesting that what you wrote could be upsetting to a real person for personal, not intellectual, reasons. Maybe I'm wrong that somebody would be upset by it, but I don't think it's fair to throw the PC card in my face.

Definitely true. If someone says something I find offensive I go somewhere else. I don't hang around places that offend me. You should try it sometime.

You're totally off on this. Public places (and /. is pretty public) should induce a bit different behavior in you than when you're around a small group. I'd be the first guy to make Hiroshima jokes among my friends (we'd probably get along pretty good outside /.) but I wouldn't try one when speaking in public. You were speaking in public.

Tell me how many hiroshima survivors do you know on slashdot? How many holocaust survivors do you know on slashdot? It's funny that there is always some unspecified period of time that has to go by until you are allowed to joke about some horrible event and if you are one to break the silence prematurely you are castigated.

Yeah, I think the unspecified period is when there aren't people around who experienced the event. For example, you would be insensitive to joke about 9/11, since there are probably people here who lost friend and relatives. Seriously, you know well enough not to joke about 9/11 (nobody does here) yet you call me a prude for suggesting similar logic dictates not joking about Hiroshima. They aren't equivalent, but the same tangent of logic applies.

Look, it's not like I don't care about what happened in hiroshima or the nazi concentration camps but the fact is there is no one, except sensitive prudes like you, on slashdot that is going to get offended.

For the last time, *I* wasn't offended. I was annoyed by your flippant response to people who suggested that if was rude to make such a joke. If I was offended by anything, it was your BS, not your joke. And 'the fact is' you have NO idea who's reading /. or who would be legitimately offended. Laughter is great, but if you can't be funny without joking about modern holocausts, then you've got a rather deficient sence of humor.

Re:In related news..

[Xabraxas]

PC is when you have to refer to Oriental people as Asians because some oversensitive ex-hippie professor at Swarthmore (who's white) finds it offensive.

Now that IS offensive. It's funny that after this whole discussion you cannot realize why that is offensive.

PC is more about the heightened sensitivities of academics, not the people they are referring to

That's your own definition and I have no idea where it came from.

You're totally off on this. Public places (and /. is pretty public) should induce a bit different behavior in you than when you're around a small group. I'd be the first guy to make Hiroshima jokes among my friends (we'd probably get along pretty good outside /.) but I wouldn't try one when speaking in public. You were speaking in public.

So when you're with a group of friends in the city do you look over your shoulder everytime you say something that MIGHT be offensive? This is slashdot. I may not know everyone but I know my company. Of course I'm going to get some oversenstive people like you bitching but like I said I don't really care.

Yeah, I think the unspecified period is when there aren't people around who experienced the event. For example, you would be insensitive to joke about 9/11, since there are probably people here who lost friend and relatives. Seriously, you know well enough not to joke about 9/11 (nobody does here) yet you call me a prude for suggesting similar logic dictates not joking about Hiroshima. They aren't equivalent, but the same tangent of logic applies.

You see 9/11 jokes are ok by me too. I have a sense of humor but I'm not going to joke about the subject with survivors just as I haven't in this whole fucking thread.

For the last time, *I* wasn't offended. I was annoyed by your flippant response to people who suggested that if was rude to make such a joke. If I was offended by anything, it was your BS, not your joke.

If you weren't offended why the hell are you complaining so much? You are the one frothing out the mouth and spewing the BS.

And 'the fact is' you have NO idea who's reading /. or who would be legitimately offended. Laughter is great, but if you can't be funny without joking about modern holocausts, then you've got a rather deficient sence of humor.

Modern holocausts? You act like holocaust survivors and hiroshima survivors hang out on slashdot. If you have a clue at all you will notice that NO survivors of either tragedy have complained. In fact you are the only one who has which just proves to me that you are a hypersensitive, politically correct whiner.

Re:In related news..

[birge]

like I said I don't really care.

This pretty much sums it up. There's really no point arguing.

Re:In related news..

[VolciMaster]

Actually, it's not so much a 'might' be able to make the case. The case is made in several places.

It's also worth while noting that there were two other cities on the list to be bombed if the Japanese did not surrender. We also spent a lot of effort ahead of time 'paper bombing' the cities warning people to leave.

I've done substantial research into this issue for a discussion group in my church, and the parent post about the fire bombings in Europe and Japan is a very good point. Far more people were killed in those attacks than in the two atomic bombings.

and people womder...

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

why siberia's permafrost is melting @_@

Re:and people womder...

[aktzin]

Maybe this is what Sir Arthur C. Clarke meant when he said that supernovae are probably industrial accidents.

Re:and people womder...

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Overclock an electronic computer -> chip burns to a crisp.
Overclock a optical computer -> Neighbours complain about the new hole through the wall, closet, chair, TV, other closet and wall.
Overclock a quantum computer -> astronomists of distant world talk about the new supernova they've spotted.

More info and a pic or two

[erick99]

I'd like to see a pic of the machine, especially the liquid nitrogen cooling stuff. I would also like to know if this machine ran for five minutes, ten minutes, melted?

Re:More info and a pic or two

[The Hobo]

Here you go Clicky

Re:More info and a pic or two

[Nick Driver]

A link to the story (in Japanese) and one in English

Re:More info and a pic or two

[Via_Patrino]

If you speak japanese this is his blog

Booting Windows XP

[kihjin]

The maximum speed at which he could boot Windows XP operating system and perform memory testing was 6.60GHz.

Funny, since, no matter how fast I OC a Windows XP box, the XP "loading bar" still moves the same old speed.

Re:Booting Windows XP

[PsychicX]

That's because it's limited by how fast your hard drive is, not how fast your processor is.

Or did you think all of the data was stored in your L2 cache?

Re:Booting Windows XP

[kihjin]

FYI, I meant it as a joke. The 'loading bar' is nothing more than an animated graphic. It serves no purpose other than to tease the user.

Re:Booting Windows XP

[magarity]

the XP "loading bar" still moves the same old speedM
 
Get a solid state hard drive. Texas Memory Systems if you have serious cash; Gigabyte iRam if you're on a budget.

Re:Booting Windows XP

[cnettel]

It sure helps you to notice a bit faster if it got stuck when loading a driver that blocks the interrupt handling...

Re:Booting Windows XP

[Czo]

Tease indeed, that's the one thing I can't stand about Apple products - progress bars that don't mean anything!

Re:Booting Windows XP

[Rick and Roll]

I got it. Also, I would not have seen the snippet of the previous poster's comment due to mod preferences w/o your post, so that was a plus too.

This overclocker really is a master. Most would just stop at "it doesn't run windows but it does get that fast". They wouldn't have bothered to do something interesting like calculate pi.

He deserves the record, and a job at Google, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Apple, wherever he wants to work.

Re:Booting Windows XP

[systemic chaos]

Better yet
1. get a job at one,
2. quit, work at another,
3. continue being brilliant,
4. ???
5. lawyers profit!

Re:Booting Windows XP

[ScottyH]

You might be joking...but if not, it's called an indeterminate progress bar. It doesn't actually show progress.

Re:Booting Windows XP

[zippthorne]

Try "overclocking" the hard disk.

Re:Booting Windows XP

[kihjin]

Yeah I was. :)

Re:Booting Windows XP

[damsa]

I believe 4. is being sued. The guy that worked at MS that went to Google who was sued ironically worked at Apple before working at MS.

pi=42

[Spodlink05]

Good job they didn't try that on an original Pentium, what with all those decimal places...

actual link

[Anonymous Coward]

Link to the actual forum posting, complete with pics.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php ?t=70225&page=5&pp=25

Re:actual link

[kihjin]

Good idea... take down the server.

Please use the Coralized link:
http://www.xtremesystems.org.nyud.net:8090/forums/ showthread.php?t=70225&page=5&pp=25

Re:actual link

[doomtiki]

If you looks closely at the first screenshot, you will see that the system tempeture is 242 degrees Celcius (468 Fahrenheit).

Apple was right!

[Geckoman]

Now we know why Apple switched to Intel! I can't wait for a PowerBook running one of these, complete with the Ghostbusters-style backpack pumping liquid nitrogen to my laptop!

Re:Apple was right!

[eshefer]

don't laugh...

Apple is actually selling liquid-cooled hardware (high end G5 systems).

Might be interesting to see if they try use that technology on the future intel based workstations...

Re:Apple was right!

[NeuroManson]

And cryogenically freezing your sperm for the future, absolutely free of charge!

Re:Apple was right!

[Man in Spandex]

Apple calls it liquid cooling when in fact it's a bunch of heatpipes transfering the heat towards the radiator. Nothing too impressive.

There are no reservoirs or tubes or pumps so its not "actually" liquid-cooled hardware unlike what most of us think liquid cooling is which involves the above.

Re:Apple was right!

[Geckoman]

That's just countering the other effects of laptops.

Re:Apple was right!

[PoorCoder]

Backpack tank covered with foam? You'd better not walk too fast otherwise the foam will fall off and hit something then... Oh, never mind.

Re:Heat?

[erick99]

Liquid nitrogen, according to the article.

William Shanks

[Skiron]

Yea, look what this guy did (or didn't)

Ooops!

Re:William Shanks

[Rick and Roll]

That's a lot of p.

Re:Heat?

[elbondo]

If you RTFA, it says he used Liquid Nitrogen.

Diverting power from the dilthium crystal reactor?

[exley]

Yeah, maybe, but they could really get some serious overclocking done if they just reversed the polarity.

Re:Heat?

[Kandenshi]

From article:
"on the system that was cooled down by liquid nitrogen."

And people said

[Drew Curtis]

that x86 would never hit 100MHz!

Re:And people said

[achurch]

that x86 would never hit 100MHz!

And some of us wish it hadn't. 680x0 assembly was so beautiful . . .

Re:And people said

[Halfbaked Plan]

So why aren't you overclocking a 68040, then??

Re:And people said

[JLF65]

Because we're overclocking 68060's. Duh. The 68060 kicked the Pentium's butt six ways from Sunday. It's too bad Motorola quit work on that and instead turned it into an embedded controller (ColdFire microcontroller family).

Yeah but...

[drfishy]

...even at 7Ghz is still can't game any faster than a two year old Athlon 64 3200+... Why do games hate intel anyway?

Still slower than G4!

[porneL]

I'll be missing "nah, that's just megahertz myth".

Dry Ice Slot

[gregor-e]

Somebody needs to make an auto-overclocking system that has a slot for feeding in bricks of dry ice.

You want that render to finish before lunch? Just slide in a brick of dry ice and watch the steam come out the sides as your motherboard's temperature sensor gives the go-ahead to crank the clock up to 7 GHz.

Re:Dry Ice Slot

[Silverlancer]

Wouldn't be cold enough. You need a lot colder than dry ice to overclock to 7Ghz--maybe -180C? (Liquid nitrogen)

Re:Dry Ice Slot

[drsquare]

Perhaps liquid hydrogen, but you'd have to watch out in case some foam fell off the computer, killing everyone in the room.

Re:Dry Ice Slot

[baadger]

A PC that can kill you in a poorly ventilated room?

Re:Dry Ice Slot

[myukew]

I can't wait for someone using liquid helium. 3K...

Re:Dry Ice Slot

[simcop2387]

the problem with that is that you need extrememly high pressures also, IIRC about 26atm, i don't think i could stand that for very long

Re:Dry Ice Slot

[jo_ham]

Steam is colourless and odourless. You can't see it at all.

You can see the water vapour that condenses when steam hits cold air or other cold surfaces, but since you're using dry ice, you would get gaseous CO2 as a result, not water. No steam in sight.

Re:Dry Ice Slot

[MustardMan]

Except when you have a hunk of dry ice, you see fog coming off of it, for the exact same reason you described seeing "normal" steam. The cold of the dry ice condenses water vapor already in the air. At least, when you live somewhere humid like I do, you almost always see steam coming off dry ice.

Re:Dry Ice Slot

[MulluskO]

Steam is colourless and odourless. You can't see it at all.

You're an ass.

steam n.

      1.
                  1. The vapor phase of water.
                  2. A mist of cooling water vapor.


Ass.

Re:Dry Ice Slot

[Silverlancer]

Below about -180C, the semiconductivity of silicon fails, so no you can't get any colder.

Re:Dry Ice Slot

[jo_ham]

Except it's not steam, it's water vapour. Steam is colourless and 100C, not cold and white/visible.

AMD64

[42Penguins]

Even though they've made clockspeed less relevant, I'd kinda like to see this sort of extreme overclocking on AMD.
Or does it already exist?
All I know is I see all these liquid nitrogen P4s and think "wtf...where's amd?"

Re:AMD64

[mindwar]

clock speed doesnt go that high for amd so overclocking a intel would be far more spectaculous. amd gets its share of extremeer overclocking. check out xtremesystems / futuremark's orb

Re:AMD64

[superpulpsicle]

This is the part I am confused about. Is Intel technically the crown king again in performance?

They got to take the best AMD64 has to offer and match it overclocking just like this one.

Re:AMD64

[Mishra100]

MHz doesn't define performance. AMD focuses on other technologies to make the motherboard/cpu faster. Like bus speeds and that such. This is why a 2.0 GHZ can match an Intel 3.5 Ghz.

oblig

[justforaday]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!

Re:oblig

[tmilam]

Yes, but can it run OSX86?

7.1ghz Intel vs 4ghz AMD?

[eswelsh]

Curious how this would perform vs the FX57 recently overclocked to 4ghz...

Is Overclocking necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be easier to switch to Linux or BSD rather than having to resort to this just to run Microsoft's next OS with SuperClippy 10.0?

Comparison

[vorm]

I tried the same test on my 2Ghz P4 Northwood with 768MB RAM. It took 1min 34sec to calculate pi to 1 million digits.

Re:Comparison

[bhtooefr]

FWIW, a 2.5GHz Pentium M can do it in about 25 seconds. Some guy got a P-M up to 3GHz using Liquid Nitrogen (the 735 (1.7GHz) appears to be the most popular OCer, apparently b/c it's got a good multi, and isn't too expensive, but I don't think he used that. I think he used the 755.), but it only did SuperPi 1M in 26 seconds for some strange reason *cough*fake*cough*.

Stardate 7234.1

[MightyMartian]

Spock: Our ship's computer is running too slow. I project we will collide with the Klingon cruiser in 2.3 minutes.

Bones: You green blooded sonofabitch.

Kirk: Bones... shut... up... Scotty, I need 7ghz... now.

Scotty: I canna do it, cap'n. It'll blow the mains, and Windows 9000 will crash.

Kirk: No... excuses... Scotty... just get me... 7ghz.

Scotty (resigned): Aye, cap'n.

Uruha: We're getting in a signal for Starfleet Command. It's Admiral Gates.

Kirk: Put... him... on...

Admiral Gates: Here at Microsoft we believe in innovation. Thus we are sending you SP23482378485847825727347198874741 which will allow Windows 9000 to interact with an overclocked Pentium without making rude sounds and the voice of the computer changing from Majel Barrett to Carrot Top. Let me demonstrate.

Spock: Admiral Gates, it appears that your demonstration computer has exploded, taking out a large chunk of the planet Earth.

Scotty: Cap'n, we've got 7ghz now!

Kirk: Good work, Scotty. Sulu... reboot... the... computer.

Spock: Captain, it appears there's a penguin on the main viewer.

Re:Stardate 7234.1

[Spodlink05]

Kirk: No... excuses... Scotty... just get me... 7ghz.

Being dead is a pretty good excuse.

Re:Stardate 7234.1

[thumperward]

Whoever modded this funny should take a long, hard look at themselves. And never tell jokes again.

  - Chris

athlon 2400+ using FASTPI 1M places in 4.4 secs

[t35t0r]

Comment taken from the website:

"18.516 must be wrong. My athlon 2400+ did
1 million places of PI using FASTPI in 4.4 secs.

Maybe the number should read 1.8516 secs.
That would be more in line with factors of
speed differences between my 2400 and
the P4 system."

Re:athlon 2400+ using FASTPI 1M places in 4.4 secs

[bhtooefr]

FASTPI != SuperPi...

Re:athlon 2400+ using FASTPI 1M places in 4.4 secs

[timmyd]

Nope, looks like 18secs according to the screenshot. it could just be that amd chips or better in that respect or that it's depending on another factor--like his RAM.

Re:athlon 2400+ using FASTPI 1M places in 4.4 secs

[fregaham]

Funny... I always thought all PIs were created equal...

Re:athlon 2400+ using FASTPI 1M places in 4.4 secs

[TheLink]

He was using super pi.

Some stats: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1 815&page=3

http://www.planetamd64.com/lofiversion/index.php/t 5459.html

I'm not sure about fastpi. But pifast appears to allow 2-4GHz computers to do 10 million digits of pi in about 30 seconds.

Re:athlon 2400+ using FASTPI 1M places in 4.4 secs

[linzeal]

It may be a different PI calculating software package as well. Compare the speed of simple vector calc rotations in matlab to mathematica sometime, matlab wins.

Re:athlon 2400+ using FASTPI 1M places in 4.4 secs

[bhtooefr]

Pi == Pi, yes, but FASTPI uses a different (faster) algorithm than SuperPi...

Re:athlon 2400+ using FASTPI 1M places in 4.4 secs

[Savantissimo]

I remember a past pie going out to the $40,000,000,000 face in about 0.5 sec. In Belgium.

[Mod me +5 - most gratuitous use of the word "face"]

Too Solid

[PingPongBoy]

Not exactly bricks - it's better to just fill a chamber in the case from a bottle of compressed CO2. The problem is, this chamber will inhibit the heat sink when empty. As a result, liquid coolant is better than solid coolant.

Re:Too Solid

[dbIII]

it's better to just fill a chamber in the case from a bottle of compressed CO2

Liquid nitrogen is easier to deal with (I've transported it short distances in a conventional thermos), cheap and colder. The only hassle is it conducts electricity, so actually immersing the chip in the stuff is going to cause problems, and near the surface of the liquid you have to worry about condensation forming ice.

Safety? Well it's safe so long as you don't do anything stupid, and even then it's not too bad. Small drops of liquid nitrogen on the skin tend to slide off with no effect since a layer of gas boiling off makes it difficult to wet anything. Metal or ceramics chilled to liquid nitrogen temperatures have no such barrier and accidental contact hurts. It takes a surprisingly long time to soak something the size of a banana in liquid nitrogen so that it will easily shatter when removed and dropped - I think it was around ten minutes. The resulting banana chunks taste good - probably due to the very small ice crystals from rapid cooling, but it needs to warm up a bit first or it will stick to your tongue and burn it - which happened to a guy I know who now runs a lab at an explosives factory. Putting twenty litres of boiling water in a sink with four litres of liquid nitrogen makes an impressive ankle deep mist that looks good when it fills the corridoors and rolls down a couple of flights of stairs.

turnabout...

[moviepig.com]

This Japanese guy overclocked a Pentium 4 to 7.132GHz!!

... fast enough to reverse the flow of time on planet Krypton...

Take down the server.

[uberdave]

Take down the server? Are you saying that it can calculate pi to 1 million decimal places in 18.516 seconds, but it can't stand up to a little slashdotting? Sheesh!

Re:Take down the server.

[kihjin]

Then it's masquerading as an American. http://ws.arin.net/whois/?queryinput=209.58.227.16 3 Must just be an error :-P

What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 68000 in my Amiga 500 ran about that fast.

Oh wait, did you say GigaHertz?

Re:What's the big deal?

[StikyPad]

Right, but it starts with a soft G, as in George.

Re:Heat?

[Bushcat]

Chocolate.

Now at 7285.1 MHz

[Ixalon]

Someone has already clocked up an extra 150MHz!

Calculating 1m decimal places of Pi now down to 18.093s...

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php ?p=1001108#post1001108

Re:Now at 7285.1 MHz

[dangil]

but as it is overclocked, can we trust the results ??

I wouldn't

Re:Now at 7285.1 MHz

[polysylabic psudonym]

Think you mean "Calculating 1M decimal places of pi..."

Capital M means mega, which means millions,
Lower case m means milli, which means thousandths.

Vista requirements

[Medieval_Thinker]

...and in related news, Microsoft has revised the minimum processor requirements for Vista.

Re:Yes, yes...

[mindwar]

but can it run google earth on osx86 while coding AJAX using ruby on rails?

Intel

[ziggyboy]

I'm sure some Intel chip designers have already tried all sorts of cool shit with their processors even prior to their release. I know I would if I had worked there.

Re:Does it really matter?

[rayray14]

Of course, they'd yet to try diverting power from the dilthium crystal reactor to the deflector array.

How how would they be able to do this without Scotty?!?!

Hahaha...

[Ayanami Rei]

Your statement is so misinformed, I don't even know where to begin.
I'm guessing you've never taken a single class in digital electronics, computer architecture, or electrical engineering.

Re:Hahaha...

[SigveK]

To be fair, the grandparent do have a point.
If the clock period is less than the propagation delay of the transistors in the processor, the processor will not meet its critical deadlines, and the results will be unstable.

However.
If that was the case, I doubt it would be able to run much at all, let alone an operating system.

Re:Hahaha...

[rob_squared]

Thank you for putting what I was trying to say more elequantly. As you notice in the article they mentioned Windows being able to run tests, the maximum was 6.6GHz, and the 7.22GHz version wouldn't go past the BIOS. And to the GP of this post, I graduated from an accredited university, people far smarter than I are saying this.

Re:Hahaha...

[cnettel]

And if you read the article again, you'll find that the guy not booting WinXP over 6.6 GHz was a different one from the one calculating pi at 7.13 GHz (running on Windows...).

Re:Does it really matter?

[databyss]

Hey, my 486dx computer had a turbo button on it!

I'm sure it would've smoked this P4 thing...

Besides... 486 is 121.5 times bigger than 4!

heh

[smoondog]

I bet it smoked while it was running. tweak 3d has some (outdated) stuff on overclocking the P4.

Imagine

[andersbergh]

...DOS on this CPU, press one key, get 2 million other keys for free.

Re:Imagine

[MoeDrippins]

> int main(){for(;;){fork();};}

What's the last semicolon for?

Re:Imagine

[andersbergh]

What semicolon? ;)

RTFA, please,

[hummassa]

it's just two paragraphs for $DEITY sake.
Ok, I'll tell you, lazy boy: besides cooling with liquid N2, they tweaked the processor and the memory voltages.

Re:RTFA, please,

[edunbar93]

Yeah, but the article is written in Engrish. You'll probably also have to translate it for him.

Re:wow...

[bhtooefr]

On a *SERIOUS* note, it's about as fast as a 3.5 or 4GHz Pentium M by my estimates...

Re:Does it really matter?

[Tony Hoyle]

How how would they be able to do this without Scotty?!?!

Easy. They reversed the polarity. You can fix anything by reversing the polarity.

Deflector Array?

[Tom7]

I think it might be more profitable to redirect the power to the processor.

According to his calculation...

[TCQuad]

All the numbers were 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 or 0.

Re:According to his calculation...

[nofx_3]

Yes, his calculation obviously is flawed as it left out throuth, the secret (but real) integer between 3 and 4 that lots of arrogant people tend to over-look.
 
-kaplanfx

Re:According to his calculation...

[reclusivemonkey]

By my reckoning, youve got about eight too many digits there...

Re:According to his calculation...

[retinaburn]

Of course if you go far enough you can see D U P ! 3 1 4 1 5 9

Re:This proves once again..

[myukew]

simple: liquid nitrogen

Re:Heat?

[darklordyoda]

The Pay 'n Spray.

Re:Diverting power from the dilthium crystal react

[oxygene2k2]

*yawn* _what_ do you think are we using alternating current for? we run on reversed polarity _all_ _the_ _time_.

Re:Cock Fight

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, when whiteboys do something, it's because we've got nothing to prove.

When "they" do something, it's because "they've" got something to prove. We're just so fucking awesome for no reason, aren't we? Asshole.

Eh!?

Re:wow...

[Dogtanian]

By my estimates, it's about as fast as a Cray-2, but I may be pulling that out of my ass.

You intend pulling a Cray-2 out of your ass?!

Are you a fan of the Goatse man by any chance?

My only question is....

[LordPhantom]

... will it meet the min. specs for Duke Nukem Forever?

Re:The "dangers" of overclocking.

[mOdQuArK!]

If your instructions take longer to execute than the number of cycles available to them, it just can't do the work and you get junk in your registers.

Your statement is true on its face, but do you really understand why this guy could get his chip to overclock so high? He's not cooling it in LN2 just to keep it from melting (although that is certainly very important).

At low temperatures, typical silicon transistors operate much faster, and wires have less impedance, thus allowing a properly-designed chip to operate correctly at a much higher frequency than it would normally be able to achieve.

It's certainly not useful for a user who wouldn't have a constant source of LN2 available, but the fact that it can be done makes some interesting engineering scenarios possible.

Is the computer clock here reliable?

[Mostly a lurker]

I was admit there is a substantial gap in my understanding here and this comment may reflect that. However, when running a computer way outside its design specifications, how much reliance can be placed in any timing measurements it is reporting? Surely some kind of extrnal timing machanism should be used.

Re:Is the computer clock here reliable?

[Afecks]

I was admit there is a substantial gap in my understanding here and this comment may reflect that. However, when running a computer way outside its design specifications, how much reliance can be placed in any timing measurements it is reporting? Surely some kind of extrnal timing machanism should be used.

The "clock" they are talking about has nothing to do with keeping time. A clock's speed is how many cycles per second it performs. A cycle being the most basic operation a CPU can do.

Also, the clock doesn't tell you how fast it runs..you tell it. This is how they were able to overclock it. That is, setting the clock higher than the default speed.

The only measurement that would be in question is the time in seconds it took to calculate pi and that has nothing to do with clock speed.

Motherboards of today keep time using an on-board CMOS chip which uses very little power and runs on a small long-lasting battery. This is completely independent of the CPU and it is how your computer has the correct time even after it's been powered off.

Bounty!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

"SCO employee? Check out the bounty [sec.gov]"

So now there's a bounty on SCO employees!?! Cool! It's about time! Perhaps now I can make up some of the money I lost trying to short their stock. ;)

I take it this started after they all went around carrying caricatures of a grossly overweight Linus smoking pot?

Re:Bounty!?!

[JLF65]

No, he's pointing out the rat-fink fund the SEC maintains for stool pigeons. He hopes a SCO employee will rat out the execs for money. I hope so too. :)

Re: your sig

[TeknoHog]

Choose the 'Light' setting from your /. preferences. No tables there.

I think the regular layout is totally unbearable. If /. didn't have the Light setting, I'd probably have left the site ages ago... which might actually be a good thing ;)

Re:Heat?

[ActionJesus]

> The Pay 'n Spray.

Wish I had mod points, not often I literally laugh out loud reading slashdot. :)

And some luck.

[btarval]

They also must have gotten lucky with the CPU. Back before Intel started adding their stupid locks to limit overclocking, it was painfully obvious that the production run played a factor. And even within the production run, there were always CPU's within any given batch that were better than others.

The last set of great overclocked CPU's were the Celeron 300's. Many of those went to 450-500 MHz with no problem. A very few could be made to hit 600 MHz, though it is questionable on how reliable they were at that point. Certainly reliable enough to calculate the value of PI quickly; but you wouldn't want one for reliable web server.

Granted, some of the one's which could do 450-500 MHz were made for that speed, and then sold as 300's. But certainly not all of them.

The bottom line is that cherry-picking your CPU's helps lead to a better chance of success with overclocking.

Re:And some luck.

[nofx_3]

I believe you are thinking of the Celeron 300A (Yep, I owned one and pushed it to 500 for several years at the stock voltage with stock heatsink). The Celeron 300 IIRC was a diff chip than the 300A (lacked L2 cache or something).
 
-kaplanfx

Re:And some luck.

[marat]

I thought it's well known now that at some point Intel simply became unable to mass-produce Celerons crappy enough not to run on higher clockspeeds, but they was still a market for low grade processors, so they decided to remark higher models - this is Celeron 300A. No wonder most of them could run 600 MHz because they were 600 MHz processors actually.

Re:And some luck.

[2bitcomputers]

I had a dual processor Celly 366Mhz system overclocked to a dual 550Mhz system run stable for 2 years with only slightly oversized aluminium heatsinks and stock fans. I used an Asus Mobo that let you manualy enter the Vcor voltage and CPU freq and multiplyer in the BIOS. Worked like a champ.

Re:wow...

[bhtooefr]

IIRC, going by [b]APPLE[/b] marketing info (back in the G4 days) and rough guestimates, a P3 1GHz is roughly as fast as a Cray-2. Try again... :P

Re:yeah, but...

[user no. 590291]

It did. It finished in about three seconds.

Cooling system?

[bev_tech_rob]

I wonder what type of cooling system the person used? Had to be pretty radical to dissipate the heat that this setup probably created..

Overclocked AMD 64 3500+

[jurt1235]

Performs at 25% overclocking with dnetc-rc5-72 as CPU test as a 7Ghz pentium 4 (Benchmark done on 3.06Ghz pentium 4 and AMD 3500+). So is this pentium 4 really so fast at 7Ghz, or does it just show the gap?

But...how long to open...

[p51d007]

Solitare? LOL

World record? LOL

[acidblood]

That may be a SuperPi world record, but definitely not the overall record: Steve Pagliarulo's QPi can compute 1 million digits of Pi in 6.68 seconds in a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz box. You read that right.

BTW, the same computer takes 189 seconds to compute 2^20 (~1 million) digits using SuperPi. Among the community of Pi-calculating programmers, it's well known that SuperPi is terribly slow. I don't know why overclockers still hang on to it when most programs out there for calculating Pi are faster than it.

Re:World record? LOL

[krajo]

Maybe they want to compare past results with new ones ? Just a guess.

Re:World record? LOL

[Pranadevil2k]

Look at it this way: If your 1.6 ghz P4 can calculate Pi in less than 7 seconds using QPi, how much room is there to show improvement? You can never shave off more than 6.68 seconds (or even that much, realistically) no matter how fast you've overclocked. Until last year most PC gaming magazines were still using Quake3 as a benchmark, getting 200 to 300 frames per second.... But at that point you actually --SEE-- no improvement. At least in this case you can tell a significantly higher number is much better than other hardware. "My 7 ghz P4 can do QPi to 1 million digits in 3 [arbitrary number 6] seconds... That kinda sucks compared to the 1.6 ghz 6.6 seconds..."

Re:World record? LOL

[dvdeug]

Among the community of Pi-calculating programmers, it's well known that SuperPi is terribly slow. I don't know why overclockers still hang on to it when most programs out there for calculating Pi are faster than it.

Because it's irrelevant how fast the program works when it's being used merely as a benchmark. Changing the program would screw up that benchmark.

Re:World record? LOL

[ejito]

Slower is actually better when running 1 million digits. Clock measurements aren't exact. In order to get a relatively more precise reading, the longer the program should run.

If it takes 1 second to compute 1 million digits on a 1ghz machine, and 1.1 seconds on a 2ghz machine, then it's time to either increase the amount of digits, or choose a slower benchmark.

Where was Shatner when they needed him?

[Lije Baley]

"The system managed to calculate pi to 1 million decimal places in 18.516 seconds" and at 19.428 seconds reduced itself to a "fiery, twisted, mass of molten metal".

Is that fast enough...

[scovetta]

Is that fast enough to get the PS3 emulator to work? Now it just makes my internet connection light up continuously...

Designed to run at 7Ghz?

[cbreaker]

The chips run at 7Ghz with crazy stupid cooling like liquid nitrogen.

I don't see this as proof that they were designed to run this fast. 4Ghz, maybe (and only from new technologies that came to surface AFTER the P4 was originally designed) - any super high speed claims that were made were entirely marketing.

Re:Designed to run at 7Ghz?

[InvalidError]

It does prove that propagation delays within the P4 have enough margin to go well beyond 4GHz. Trace propagation delays do not change much from -200C to +100C but CMOS transistors' and copper traces' conductivities do improve quite a bit.

So the devil's in the transistors and trace losses. I wonder how this will pan out at 65nm... smaller transistors are potentially faster but they have to be large enough to drive the nets and the loads these nets represent scale less than linearly with process technology. Static power is also likely to increase substantially.

I would not be surprised if phase-change cooling became common within the next 10 years, along with CPUs designed and manufactured specifically to run in sub-zero environments for the mid/high-end. I am having a hard time imagining progress much beyond 65nm (maybe 45nm) without phase-change: leakage, conduction losses, thermal noise and other temperature-dependent parameters will be major show-stoppers. Getting closer to atomic transistors is trimming noise and leakage tolerances.

Well, someone could be even more "crazy stupider" and repeat the experiment using either liquid helium (much more expensive than nitrogen) or hydrogen (kinda flammable/explosive)... they could probably reach 8.5GHz this way.

Re:Designed to run at 7Ghz?

[timeOday]

If Intel only expected 3.5-4GHz from the P4, then why didn't they have a followup x86 chip ready sooner? Intel has been stalled with very small CPU speedups for at least a couple years now. Their dual core support seems to have been an afterthought. Leaving me to wonder, did they really expect P4 to hit the wall so soon?

Re:Designed to run at 7Ghz?

[cbreaker]

If the chip was designed to run at those speeds, how come it doesn't? Shouldn't they have had a plan for reaching 6Ghz?

I'm guessing they just didn't think AMD would have forced them to push the chip to it's real (3.8Ghz) limits so fast.

Re:Designed to run at 7Ghz?

[rsynnott]

The reason for the lack of fast P4s is the limits encountered win the shift to 90nm process.

Re:Designed to run at 7Ghz?

[timeOday]

If the chip was designed to run at those speeds, how come it doesn't? Shouldn't they have had a plan for reaching 6Ghz?

Maybe they thought they did. A couple decades' past successes told them they'd be successful in finding some way to make it happen. But it didn't.

Re:Designed to run at 7Ghz?

[cnettel]

If they had somehow "solved" the increased leakage at 90 nm (a leakage which wasn't expected in 2000-2001, when these things realistically should have been prepared), the heat dissipation of the current chips would have been much lower. The only thing stopping us running the chips at at least 6 GHz seems to be the core voltage (neglecting smaller effects by the temperature itself on the core), if no heat/power problem was involved.

And if there was less leakage it would not be such a bad thing to run your P4 at 1.7 V. Hey, we were perfectly happy with 1.7 a few years ago.

So I absolutely think they at least hoped for 90 nm to scale far beyond what Prescott actually did/has done, with quite a bit better performance per watt.

Re:Designed to run at 7Ghz?

[kesuki]

not that long ago overclocking a pentium 4 (the old prescot chip) to 4.0 ghz was an accomplishment, and it required 'extreme' cooling, over voltaging etc etc... If the chip wasn't 'designed' to run at those frequencies you couldn't run it at them if you had the entire system cooled to absolute zero.

The problem is that they planned on the 10ghz pentium 4's having 1000 Watts of thermal displacment. 1000 watts man, the marketing department wanted 10 ghz chips, so the engineers found a way to do it, and the way they came up with generated 1000 watts of excess cpu heat.

The chips intel is selling now are all using the same basic power/cooling requirements of the older designs (which even with extreme over cooling could barely get to 4.0 ghz) so yeah, intel could be selling a 6 ghz pentium 4 today, with the current designs, but it would require about a 2000 watt PSU, and a condenser/refidgerant based cooling system.

People don't want a computer to draw 10 times as much electricity to run twice as fast. intel's marketing department was telling the engineers how to do there jobs, so that's why we end up with a cpu design that is absolutely useless unless it's underclocked by 50% of what it was originally designed to run at...

Re:Does it really matter?

[Wilson_6500]

Every time I try that, it just starts fires.

Technically, I guess burning down the problem is like of solving it.

The future is asynchronous!

[Midnight Thunder]

Cooling and power requirements aren't the only issue, since at those types of frequencies you are likely to be interfering with radio frequencies, unless you have really good shielding.

The real future is asynchronous CPUs, that are actually clockless. They generate much less heat and consume much less power. The only reason that they aren't replacing the current batch of chips fast, is that all chip design and testing processes are built around clocked CPUs.

A few articles on the subject:
  - Will Self-timed Asynchronous Logic Rescue CPU Design?
  - Computer Chips Without Clocks

Re:The future is asynchronous!

[AaronLawrence]

The only reason that they aren't replacing the current batch of chips fast, is that all chip design and testing processes are built around clocked CPUs.

Another way of saying this is that basically, we can't really make them. The processes for designing and testing are enormous and will take years to change over to asynchronous. And most likely we will find that there are horrible problems in large asynch processors too...

Asynch also doesn't seem to offer any actual higher speeds, just that different parts can work at their own speed. That doesn't necessarily sound like a convincing win.

Re:The future is asynchronous!

[Midnight Thunder]

I came across another article the other day that indicates that certain aspects of the x86 are already asynchronous. One thing is for certain is that increasing clock speeds can only go so far. The future, IMO, will not only be asynchronous but also multi-core or multi-CPU.

According to one of the two articles in my post it is indicated that the current processors are actually running as fast as their slowest component. With the asynchronous chips, certain components could be ignored if they aren't playing a role in the current processing. Think of asynchronous chips as "Just in Time" processing.

Re:How is it illegal?

[FinalCut]

ahh great, a post event rationalizer

As Voltaire said...

[neuroking]

Ah yes, they need to..

"Bounce the graviton particle beam
off the main defector dish.
That the way we do it lad,
we're making shit up as we wish.

The Klingons and the Romulans,
they pose no threat to us!
Cuz if we find we're in a bind,
we'll just make some shit up!"
- Voltaire (without the spelling mistakes :)

Re:As Voltaire said...

[chawly]

Voltaire did not say that ....... but he should've. Congratulations

Not really. Plouffe is behind it mainly.

[gilboooo]

While Fabrice is a respectable person, he did not invent this formula. One of the most responsible persons for this discover is called Plouffe. The complete formula name is the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe and the most interesting way is how they did "discover" it : Mathematica did with input from them and it was a surprise for them when it spitted out the formula.

http://www.google.fr/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http %3A//www.lacim.uqam.ca/~plouffe/articles/Miraculou s.pdf&ei=XFL-QuroJY7QQe6vkYUC

Re:Not really. Plouffe is behind it mainly.

[pooly7]

The formula you link is for an hexadecimaldigit, right ? http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/pi/pi_bin/pi_bin.ht ml is for the binary digit. well,whatever, anyway. I posted about a binary digit, and someone reply about the digit in decimal base... I know enough digit to do rough calculation when I need that's all I want !

Re:Not really. Plouffe is behind it mainly.

[gilboooo]

And now guess who proposed the formula for the binary digit. Yes. You already know the answer. Again. Nice to see you are interested in Pi. I love this number so much I wrote a whole article about it in french in a magazine, some years ago. Of all the time I ever spent writing articles, this one has been the funniest to write, ever. God bless ubiquitious Pi.

Re:Not really. Plouffe is behind it mainly.

[pooly7]

Really ? wow, thanks for the info. And for Pi, yeah, nice number easy to remember. (well apprently not for the guy who did the movie "Pi" who cannot remember the digits that came after the four first decimals...) Regards !

Re:Not really. Plouffe is behind it mainly.

[gilboooo]

There is a very nice book to read about Pi. It tells the history of humans calculating Pi from the ancient Egypt era and covers every new method and Pi trivia :

Pi-Unleashed by Jorg Arndt

It's a yellow book and it's very nice to read :)

There is also a good book but I've not read it yet :

Pi: A Source Book
by Lennart Berggren, Peter B. Borwein, Jonathan M. Borwein

The second one is on my "to buy" list :)

I see...

[Nitromaroder]

They've started with the preparation for the final Windows Vista release - 7.0 GHz are minimum... ;)

He's right

[R3d M3rcury]

Whatever you do, Don't mention the war.

Re:using...

[cnettel]

If you can't read the article properly, then don't read it at all. The 6.6 number was from a previous overclocking attempt made by another person, only mentioned here to give some background.

Re:How is it illegal?

[RichardX]

Doesn't matter a damn bit.
The US and UK invaded Iraq for one.. count 'em, that's one... here, I'll go over it again... one (1) single, sole, solitary, lonely, stand-alone reason.

Weapons of Mass Destruction.

It doesn't matter how many old ladies they helped across the road, how many kittens they rescued from trees, or how many evil dictators they overthrew. That's not why they went in there, and that's not what the legal case for war was based on. On the other hand, it does rather matter when they kill shitloads of civillians, get their own troops bogged down into an absolute mess of a campaign, and then discover* the WMD weren't even there in the first place.

Nobody (well, maybe SOME people, but almost nobody) is saying Saddam should have been left in power. But he could have been removed much more cleanly and easily. And there's still no WMD

*okay, it's not really 'discovering' when you knew in the first place anyway. See the downing street memos.

::Nod nod::

[Ayanami Rei]

The most time-critical paths in the CPU are also the most important. Those double-pumped ALUs are probably the touchiest components, and also the trace-op caches and branch predicition stuff. Without those, well...

Re:Diverting power from the dilthium crystal react

[exley]

Either you didn't get the joke or you're just not as funny as you think you are (something I too suffer from). Or both.

Re:using...

[seanvaandering]

If you can't read the article properly, then don't read it at all.

Reading that just made my brain explode. wowsie!

OverClock 7 GHz

[GimliGloin]

Cool but I want it in a PowerBook NOW Steve Jobs!!! Jta

Re:Pi Linux World record?

[jcarr]

Some windows users at some website make some claim about a world record and now it gets posted on slashdot? sheesh.

Anyway, I hardly think this is a record. Maybe under windows. I ran this on my 3ghz portable. (You can apt-get pi!)

root@jcarr:~# time pi 1000000 > /tmp/output
real 0m24.177s
user 0m17.816s
sys 0m0.274s

I can't believe these overclocker guys use windows. Who would run Windows on a perfectly fast machine? It'd be nice to see bogomips from these machines. Anyway, wonder if these guys should put these machines behind microwave shields.

New World Record when pigs fly...

[Jeffus]

No really.

Re:Does it really matter?

[niktemadur]

How how would they be able to do this without Scotty?!?!

Geordy Laforge?

Finished in 13.677 seconds under linux

[jcarr]

I got irritated with the story. Some record. On my laptop I used this source and computed 1M digits of pi in less than 14 seconds. Certainly someone out there has faster hardware so I don't think my "world record" will last very long. Sillyness.

root@jcarr:/home/src/fft/sample2# time ./pi_fftsg > out

real 0m13.677s
user 0m9.993s
sys 0m0.332s

Re:Finished in 13.677 seconds under linux

[black_penguin]

Finished in 9.27s second with Intel 3.2GHz (HT) on Slackware Linux 10.1 (kernel version 2.6.12). So, does this mean my machine is 1.5X faster ? :)

Re:Finished in 13.677 seconds under linux

[EvilSporkMan]

8.911s on my Athlon-64 3400+ running debian-pure64. It would probably be faster if it didn't have to waste time kicking the processor from 1000 MHz to 2400 MHz...yep, new time is 7.111 s if I throttle back up before running the test.

The answer was not 42?

[cpghost]

Calculating mere Pi digits? Bah... how wimpy!

The guy didn't ask the real question: about Life, the Universe, and Everything...

Some very cool overclocking there :)

[jonwil]

It might actually almost be fast enough to run the MAME emulation of the Vegas and Seattle boards at playable speed :P

Doesn't Count

[Dun Malg]

The article notes that a Pentium 4 had been overclocked faster earlier this year, but at that speed it was not possible for the machine to function beyond BIOS.

I'd say that not getting out of BIOS doesn't count as actually successfully overclocking at that speed. That's like saying you raised your car's compression to 150:1 successfully, with the one shortcoming being that the head shattered into fragments when the first spark plug fired.

Thanks

[Atario]

Thanks. But stop calling me Clicky.

Re:wow...

[Michael Hunt]

Who ISN'T a fan of Bob Goatse?!? Heathens....

Stardate 7234.2

[not-enough-info]

Spock: Captain, it appears there's a penguin on the main viewer.

Kirk: What's... it... doing there?

Chekov: Standin'!

Bones: l can see that!

Scotty: 'ello! Well, it's just after twenty hundred hours, and time for the penguin on top of your main viewer to explode.

*KABOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM*

Bones: How did he know that was going to happen?

Spock: It was an inspired guess.

Re:Yes, yes...

[JiffyJeff]

Yes, but Google Earth doesn't run on OSX....

More important issues:

[gotr00t]

The reason why we can't have processors running at insane clock speeds is _not_ because of cooling and power. It's because of the limitations of the underlying principles of microprocessor technology itself.

When the clock signal is at such an incredible frequency, the clock state of every part of the processor die might actually be different. Since the speed of light puts an upward ceiling to the propagation time of electronic impulses which serve as signals, by the time the clock flips from on to off, the circuits on the far side of the die might still be in the previous clock state. The clock is effectively skewed between different physical parts of the processor, leading to unpredictable results.

In CMOS technology, there is always a propagation delay of usually a few nanoseconds in logical gates. When a processor is designed, the "critical path", or the path it takes the longest for a signal to pass through, is calculated, and the clock speed is heavily influenced by this (and pipelining, etc.) When the clock speed is set too high by the user, there is not enough time in one clock cycle for certain gates to complete their operations.

There's probably a lot more issues than these limiting the clock speeds of processors, but these are probably the leading reasons why processors get unstable, or even completly inoperable when they are overclocked too high.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't about winning ...

[Qbertino]

... the war but about showing Stalin who was boss. Japan was about to surrender and everybody in charge knew it. (Japan was just slowpoking because the emporer was looking for a way to surrender without him/Japan "losing face" - a *very* important thing in japan). Arguably the bomb minimized those japanese concerns and speeded up the process.
The other reason the bomb was used is the usual simple one: Because the US military had it. They had a new toy and were happy to still have a reason to use it.
And BTW: Nagasaki was an "accident". Well, sort of. The sky wasn't clear and the bombers couldn't see groung zero clearly and had strikt orders not to drop in that case. But the pilot couldn't open a valve on a fuel tank on the bomber, so they still had to drop the heavy bomb in order to make it back to base.

Re:How is it illegal?

[Xabraxas]

killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.

Pulling a number out of your ass doesn't make your case for you. Have you thought about the human life the US has taken in this war?

there are plenty of coutnerarguments pointing out the instability of the region due to Saddam and the possible positive long-term effects of removing empowered dictators with grudges against open societies. Saddam would have just passed power to his even crazier sons.

That's an odd thing to say considering Iraq is now MORE unstable and in fact although Saddam was a cruel dictator he actually repressed religious extremists. Now Iraq is on the brink of civil war and it will either get bloodier or in the end it will be ruled by a dictator again.

Emotively calling them "criminals" just makes you look like another looney lefty that most people don't respond to very well, particularly considering that Clinton bombed plenty of places without UN permission and let terrorists (including Bin Laden) go all the time. Somehow, I doubt you complained back then.

You're the one that sounds like a looney. It's amazing how you conservatives can never account for your beloved president's actions so you end up criticizing Clinton like I even give a fuck about Clinton. He wasn't even left wing so what the hell are you talking about anyway? Bush, on the other hand IS a CRIMINAL. He authorized an attack on a country that did not attack us in any way, shape, or form. That is a crime whether you want to believe it or not.

Oh and that bullshit about Clinton letting bin Laden go. IT'S A MYTH! Why don't you get a clue and stop repeating the same old bullshit that was proven false years ago.