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AMD Phenom II Overclocked To 6.5GHz
An anonymous reader writes "During CES a group of overclockers with access to liquid nitrogen and liquid helium for the extra boost of coldness cooled an AMD Phenom II X4 chip to -232 degrees Celsius. Once they got the chip cooled to this frigid temperature, they pushed the clock speed all the way up to 6.5GHz, which is a world record for a quad-core CPU, and then dished out an astonishing 45,474 3DMark05 score!"
.. to get a decent score in 3DMark ..
Numbers must be really crunchy at that temperature
which is a world record for a quad core CPU and they dished out and astonishing 45,474 3DMark05 score! Watch the video below to see how it was done and how history was made:
Truly PHENOMenal, but I can't help but (cynically, I admit) think about how history inevitably mocks overclockers. Cue back to the 90s and a headline might have read "486 overclocked to 500Mhz -- history has been made!". Like Ozymandias, nothing beside remains...
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Yeah, only 6.5GHz too.
Call me when it goes up to 11
I'm not sure if it's quite -232 Celsius in my apartment but it's pretty close. They probably could have achieved 6.0GHz overclocking using an air-cooled system in my living room alone.
Don't we already have CPUs running at 3GHz?
I was there, too. The coolest it got was approximately -242 degrees C; the warmest was approximately -218 degreesC, at least while I was watching.
The party was the XtremeSystems.org party at its LV headquarters, and it was sponsored primarily by AMD, DFI, Gigabyte, Cooler Master, and Thermaltake. It seems to me that Commodore had a presence there, too.
See ThinkComputers' blog for some more pictures (disclosure: my article).
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...with my lightning-fast 486!!!
AMD doesn't make any $1200 chips.
Like it or not, that's just not the market they're in. They're doing well at the $200 level, though.
I'm not particularly concerned that there's little competition in the segment I'd never pay for anyway. I mean, it's nice that there are Maybach Mercedes and McLaren F1's, but that doesn't mean I'm worried about competetiveness in the segment.
Whereas I'd be worried if there was only one mid-priced performance sedan, especially if it was sub-expectations in some way.
I don't think AMD is ashamed to have set a record with a $235 chip, in a world previously dominated by $1000+ chips.
I know I once bought a specific CPU because I knew it would be good for overclocking. It wasn't a bad idea -- a 1.8 ghz CPU that I could get running at 2.4, at perhaps half or a third the price of a similar CPU at 2.4 ghz, and I'd overclock my RAM, also.
I learned two things:
First, you really have to know your stuff. The RAM I had wouldn't overclock very well, and RAM which would cost a bit more. I had the BIOS helping me out, and I still had to fiddle with timings and voltages.
And second, despite all the stress testing I did, it would still occasionally crash. I never tracked down these crashes until I clocked it back to spec. Once I got a job, I decided that shelling out another hundred dollars or so for a faster CPU was a better use of my time than trying to overclock one, and dealing with the instability once I did.
Now, that's probably a completely different area than overclocking to 6.5 ghz, but if I really needed that, I imagine it would be much more cost-effective to buy two or three of them. It won't really help rasterized games (that'd be video-card bound), and raytraced games should scale to multiple machines.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
yes, yes we do.
i cant tell but is there an incredibly large whoosh goin over my head? (or just your head?). 6.5Ghz is faster than 3. And in other news six is afraid of 7, because 7, 8, 9
I'm fairly sure 'epic fail' doesn't even begin to describe your post
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I don't know what weird kind of units you are using in your part of the world. But the rest of the planet is using Celsius for everyday temperature measures and Kelvin for scientific measures (same step size, different zero).
And on our scale, absolute zero (0K) is -273C.
Thus -242C (aka 31K) is pretty legal and possible temperature. (Although maybe not a very common one outside university labs and mad overclocker's basements)
Now please stop using Réaumur scale and start using what everybody else is using around.
--
PS: I checked, -242Ré is indeed impossible on Réaumur scale - 0 K is -218Ré
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What I think is really amazing about this is that at a clock speed of 6.5 GHz, each cycle takes around 15 nanoseconds (15 * 10^-9 seconds) to complete. In this time frame light can only travel around 5 cm. Electrical signals travel close to this speed themselves, so the limit of clock speeds is being reached, since the chip itself is on this same order of distance. It is around the point where one side of the chip will not be able to communicate with the other side in a single clock cycle.
I'm highly surprised and intrigued the chip even worked at -242C (31K!) for a long time it was speculated in overclocking circles that weird things would happen to current silicon much below the temperature of liquid nitrogen. It does seem liquid helium has been tried a few times but this is the lowest reported temperature I have ever seen on a overclocked CPU. It might not mean much for people who don't care about overclocking but I think this is a significant achievement.
I'm also intrigued by the possibility this chip could have gone faster, it may have become bound by motherboard reference clock and multipliers at this speed. It's not uncommon for the motherboards ability to deliver current to become the limiting factor.
8ghz is reportedly the outright world record http://www.nordichardware.com/news,5505.html Although I think this was reset to 8.2ghz not long after.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I generally don't let these types of things affect the CPU I use for work. I have found that in order for a system to be fast, all components much be equally matched. When the CPU is overclocked by a factor of 2, and the memory is not, the amount of time spent waiting on memory will increase significantly. If a designer knew the chip would be run at the higher speed, more cache would generally be included to make up for the disparity between CPU speed and memory speed. A good rule for buying new systems is to upgrade in two halves. I generally buy motherboard, RAM, CPU, and power supply at the same time for compatibility reasons. A year or two later, I will update my storage and video card. I buy a motherboard that supports the fastest memory made, I buy a lot of memory, and I buy a CPU that is at a point on the price to performance curve where spending more doesn't yield much more performance. In a year or two when software starts to actually use this capacity, Ill upgrade storage and video for a bit of a boast. Unfortunately, faster hard drives only make a bit of difference.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
Wow.
People use liquid nitrogen to over clock a CPU, news at 11.
Well, really they used liquid helium. When you use liquid helium (which has a boiling point of about 4.2K at 1 atmosphere), you're using the liquid nitrogen (boiling point of 77K) just to keep the liquid Helium cold longer. Using liquid nitrogen is sort of boring - you can store it in an insulated jug for a good long while even, but using liquid helium is, well, pretty damned cool!
And in other news six is afraid of 7, because 7, 8, 9
Oh, that makes sense! I always thought 6 was just a big pussy.
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