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!"

Comments

The things you have to go through..

[DigitAl56K]

.. to get a decent score in 3DMark ..

Re:The things you have to go through..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's good to know that I can spend a few thousand on cooling supplies now and get a machine that can run Crysis.

I was worried I'd have to wait a year or two for those kinds of numbers to reach the few hundred dollar range.

Re:The things you have to go through..

[slimjim8094]

Yeah. The sequel is called Cryo.

Crunchy

[x1050us]

Numbers must be really crunchy at that temperature

from TFA

[caffeinemessiah]

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...

Re:Zomg

[sakdoctor]

Yeah, only 6.5GHz too.
Call me when it goes up to 11

FIRST POST

[A. B3ttik]

...with my lightning-fast 486!!!

Re:A cat has gotten my tongue

[Merovign]

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.

Stability?

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

Re:Stability?

[Belial6]

Overclocking is like tricking out your Honda Accord. It is a hobby in and of itself. It isn't a good idea for people who just want a computer that works well, just as constant modification to an Accord isn't a good idea for people that just want a reliable form of transportation. That doesn't mean that they are not perfectly reasonable hobbies. It just means that they are not hobbies for me, not hobbies for most people, and most people will think you are wasting your time because it is not their form of entertainment.

Personally, I have purchased a brand new homebrew Amiga clone within the last year, and have purchased 2 C64 clones within the last 5 years. I certainly know what it means to enjoy a hobby that the vast majority of people "don't get".

The biggest problem with overclocking for the masses is that if you don't enjoy the act of overclocking in and of itself, you can achieve better results through procrastination.

Re:Zomg

[hierophanta]

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

Re:first post!

[ByOhTek]

I'm fairly sure 'epic fail' doesn't even begin to describe your post

Metric ?

[DrYak]

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

Re:I was there

[Hordeking]

-242C is a temperature that doesn't exist, unless your religion allows temperatures below absolute zero. All we need now is a campaign for Intelligent Cold. ;)

In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

Light Distances

[SuperAndy]

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.

Re:Light Distances

[SuperAndy]

I am, my apologies. The end of a long day of physics. That gives a light-distance of 46 mm, or around 5cm. So I got the right final value, just dodgy working.

I'm suprised it even worked

[w0mprat]

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.