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Pentium 4 631 Overclocked to 8 GHz
Andreas writes "There are always those who are willing to take things one step further than others. A group of guys known as OC Team Italy is one of them. They recently pushed an Intel Pentium 4 631 to over 8000MHz using an ASUS P5B with modified voltage regulation and liquid nitrogen. Overclocking is cool and all, but this extends beyond what some would perhaps call useful. Still a milestone though."
All the trouble those Italians do to cook sausage without burning it.
To save thoughs who just want to see the setup pictures
Thats just in time!
Vista is released in a couple of days, we need at least one machine up to spec.
liqbase
It's also how fast your circuits can switch, and how fast the signal can travel on the wires. The execution core of a Pentium 4 also happens to be double-pumped (i.e., it performs operations on both edges of the clock signal). Essentially, those ALUs would be switching at 16GHz ... I, personally, take this with a grain of salt.
The Raven
Get with it guys, now it is about making silent fanless but powerful systems....
Not creating a CPU that sucks down 300W+, has one core and generally sucks.
Indeed. Light travels just under 2 centimetres in the 16 GHz period. The Pentium 4 core is not much smaller than this... it seems like they're pushing their luck on order-of-magnitude estimates alone.
setup2
Thermometer at -192 deg.C
photo of screen at 8000.7MHz
CPU-Z verified
The extreme cooling they are doing is not just for removing the heat generated by the chip. As temperature decreases, the mobility of charge carriers increases, allowing for a faster circuit. In fact, if they were to run a supercooled chip at the nominal clock frequency, they would have hold time violations and the chip would not work. In other words, the data would propagate so quickly that it would corrupt the previous piece of data.
Is 8000 MHz supposed to sound more impressive than 8 GHz?
I'm just confused as to why it was worded so oddly.
Funny the pack of cigarettes with the government mandatory sign: "Il fumo uccide" (smoking kills...) besides the smoking board...
What I'm more curious about is how the frak they managed to get a FSB of 1,5 GHZ on a Pentium II 333 MHZ
http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=159352
I think you have a misconception of how dual processor machines work. I do not think it means what you think it means.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
f = 16 GHz = 16 × 10^9 1/s gives a period t = 1/f = 0.0625 × 10^(–9) s. Distance x = ct = 3.00 × 10^8 m/s × 0.0625 × 10^(–9) s = 0.019 m. But yes, a THz chip would be seriously up-fucked.
Obligatory Google Calculator link
Everyone knows bigger MHZ is still king. It's just scale. How much you can do with the given clock cycle. I think they meant that it is not practical to run a processor at 3x it's normal rating using Liquid N as a coolant. It's only useful for the duration of the Liquid N supply, and that is a small Finite amount of time. Secondly, they overclocked the CPU but not Ram(according to CPUV which showed the ram @ 533 mhz) So we have the old bottleneck situation again...
The real question here is "Does MC Lag during battle?"
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
It's about performance, not MHz. Let's use SPECint as the metric. SPECint_rate scales almost perfectly with both clockspeed and core count. A P4 gets about 6.5 SPECint_rate/GHz/core, while a Core 2 gets about 11.5 SPECint_rate/GHz/core. So an 8 GHz P4 would get a score of 51.68, while a 3.4 GHz Core 2 would get 78.2.
The P4's single-core results would be substantially higher than the Core 2's single-core results, though. Interestingly, it points to what the P4 was originally designed to do: achieve high performance through high clockspeed. If process technology had met Intel's original projections, we'd have 6+ GHz P4s by now that would have been competitive with current Core 2 chips.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Tm
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Spring time for hitler and germany!
Deustchland is happy and gaaaaaaay!
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
While light itself may not have anything to do with it, the speed of light c most definitely has. It's the upper speed limit for, well, everything. Including propagation of signals.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
The speed of light in a vacuum (c) is the absolute maximum speed at which information can travel. It doesn't matter how much you cool the chip or what materials you make it out of, given our current understanding of physics* you can't push anything through it faster than 3*10**8 m/s. That gives you an absolute cannot-be-bettered upper limit for the distance that your signal can move in one cycle.
(* which might be wrong, but no-one's managed to prove it wrong yet)
*Light* has nothing to do with it, it's relativity and the *speed* of light in a vacuum that's important.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Because a P4 at 8ghz benches close to an athlon at 2.
The "speed of light," by definition, is the speed at which all electric fields propagate (not just optical ones). Even though the wire is treated as an object with constant voltage on it, physically, the electric field which creates that voltage is outside of the wire. In fact, you'll find that as long as the conductance of the wire is sufficiently high, it has little effect on the speed of signal propagation. This is because at the frequencies being discussed, the wires behave more like transmission lines than the ideal, lumped-element model used in circuit analysis.
What's actually more important to the propagation speed is the permittivity and permeability of the dielectric (insulator) surrounding the wire. As it turns out, the speed of signal propagation is identically equal to the speed of light in the dielectric medium (not by coincidence, of course). I may be wrong about this, but I believe that modern processors still use undoped silicon as the interconnect dielectric medium, which means that the signal propagation speed is c/3.4.
And as a harware engineer: As long as you dont boost the voltage too much (Which these guys prpbably did), you can not damage anything, so go for it.
Isn't that sort of like going to Lambeau Field and seeing a football and explaining to everyone that its safe to throw it?
...the fan on the GPU in the photo with the Fluke thermometer. Why isn't the fan spinning?
Informatus Technologicus
This brings back the old M&M's marketing phrase, with a twist:
"Pentium melts in your PC, not in your hand"
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
"... we'd have 6+ GHz P4s by now that would have been competitive with current Core 2 chips."
It probably would come with its own generator and liquid cooling solution as well. Lets build some friendlier chips instead, that still perform well and have nice extra's like virtualization and such. I love this new path these new chips have taken. I sometimes wonder if my computer is actually *on* sometimes, because of the lack of noise. P4, rest in pieces.
The interconnect dielectric is usually silicon dioxide, with a relative dielectric constant of 3.9. This puts the propagation speed at about c/2.
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Actually there is a way to get around the whole 'speed of light' issue - don't use light.
... now that is 'hauling ass fast', also known as immeasurably fast. When you turn on a light by flipping a switch - the light takes a measurable amount of time to get to you, but when does the light actually turn on? The instant you flip that switch - ahhh, the magic of electricity running at immeasurable speeds over wire.
Yea, the 'photonic computer' guys didn't think that one all the way through, did they?
Use electricity instead, have it run on little traces cut in silicon like the old days, but then seal the silicon in a dark ceramic casing so no light gets in, and put the whole thing in a computer case WITHOUT the clear panels - have to keep out the light.
Light is fast, no doubt, but it is measurably fast (186,000 miles per second, as I recall) - but regular electricity running in the dark across wires (or traces on silicon)
Think about it - every scientist in the past century has measured the speed of light - but how many have been able to measure the speed of electricity in a wire?
None?
Bingo!
And what kind of tools do they use to measure the speed of light?
Electronic tools made with electricity running on wires?
Bingo!
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Check out these Australian cigarette packets.
... and then they built the supercollider.
You're missing the point. If the process technology had progressed as expected, the a fast P4 wouldn't have needed huge amounts of power. Look at Power6. It's about 130-watts at 5 GHz. Which is very good power dissipation considering that it has a ton of hardware (really wide busses, huge caches, massive SMP fabric) that Core 2 doesn't.
The point I'm trying to get across is that the P4's design isn't inherently bad, for a desktop/workstation chip. The problem was that it was designed for process technology that turned out to have very different power usage characteristics than were projected.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
They have a knob that goes to 11.
How fast electrical signals travel through the wires is depending on the material the wires are made of.
Actually, the velocity of propagation equals the reciprocal of the square root of the dielectric constant of the material through which that signal passes.
--fatboy
So if a P4 @ 8.0GHz benches close to an Athlon at 2.0GHz, and an Athlon at 4.0GHz would maybe get close to a Core 2 Duo at 2.0GHz, that means we'd need a 16.0GHz P4 to beat a Core 2 Duo? Sweet!
Measuring the speed of light to 1% accuracy with junk-drawer parts and Ebay bargain istruments is not trivial, but it can be done.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
The cpu will access all memory locations at the same time, nearly causing a bus contention; and after they clock it back down to normal speed the ALUs will slowly begin to revert to those resembling the ones on the i4004.
'Course you'll want to run BeOS so you can keep an eye on is_computer_on_fire()