Slashdot Mirror
AMD Overclocks New Phenom II X4 To 7 GHz
CWmike writes "Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday introduced the latest member of its Phenom II X4 family of high-performance quad-core CPUs, which the No. 2 chip maker said it had run as fast as 7 GHz in extreme overclocking tests. Out of the box, the new X4 955 Black Edition, which is aimed at gamers and hobbyists, runs at 3.2 GHz, giving it similar performance to Intel's fastest desktop chips at lower cost, AMD says. The company was able to more than double the CPU's speed during its tests using extreme cooling technology that is not safe at home, said Brent Barry, an AMD product manager. The Web site Ripping.org notes that hobbyists with early access to the X4 955 chip have been able to clock it at up to 6.7 GHz. AMD said the chip was safe with fan cooling at up to 3.8 GHz."
So what am I supposed to do with the tank of liquid nitrogen I have in my back yard?
The Navy Motto "IF it ain't broke Fix It" "A day is wasted if you don't learn something new"
With new devices on the horizon being capable of recharging via heathttp://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/20/1915223, how long till we're able to capture the heat from processors and use them to cut power requirements for computers exponentially?
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
AMD has been going belly up for so long now it was easy to write them off for dead. Yet, I'm tempted to pick up their stock. Has to do better than my NBFAQ.
I think there's still some brand loyalty in Opteron - I love mine and I still think an Opteron will be my next pick of CPU.
And, the newest go around of Ubuntu Linux has some new drivers for ATI cards that should improve those matters.
A 7ghz chip is a very healthy prize for AMD. I wouldn't expect them to advertise the power usage on such a thing, but hey, its engineerings, you can't have everything at once.
I like AMD a lot, and I just hope they succeed. I know that Nehalem from Intel is a strong series of parts, and AMD has a lot of work to do, but the capital costs are so high in chipmaking that it is doubtful we would see another competitor to Intel emerge in a generation if AMD goes out.
This is my sig.
So they got (m)Ann Coulter to plop her bony, frigid ass on the thing?
It's not nice to make fun of the undead.
With her saggy ass, I had her pegged for a better insulator. Coulter, however, looks like a much better cooling fin.
Who cares what kind of rates you can get with a vat of liquid nitrogen on the damned thing? You're not going to be using that for anything practical.
Yeah, but can it run Windows 7? //Burn the Karma baby!
"The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec^2" -Marcus Dolengo
"Liquid helium, however, is much trickier -- and more dangerous -- to work with than liquid nitrogen and other more conventional coolants used by home overclockers, including water or air, said Davis."
So you're free to use your N2 to blow up 2L bottles, shatter racquetballs and such.
It's funny when Oprah says it
You just got troll'd!
With that much helium for coolant, all your audio will sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks
you realize that most of the applications you use are actually constrained by something other than your CPU speed (probably memory bandwidth or hard drive write speed).
its still not anywhere close to the performance of intels core i7, even at 3.8GHz my core i7 @ 3.3GHz would smoke it.
With so many apps & games still only capable of running on 1 cpu or core Ill wait till they quad cores run at least 4ghz before upgrading again
To me the takeaway is just how little progress chipmakers are making.
Compare to the 1990s. x86 processors started the decade with the 80486 @ 33MHz and ended with the Athlon @ 1GHz mark and was doing more per clock for even more improvement than pure clock ratings would indicate.. Now in the decade we are about to close out we have managed to push that to around 3.5GHz and by the end of '10 we might hit 4GHz and eight cores (for those willing to spend serious coin) but work per clock doesn't seem to have improved at all and if anything have even slid back a bit.
RAM improvement have slowed down as well, probably because of Windows inability to get large deployment of 64bit editions limiting demand. The 1990s saw average ram go from 1-4MB to 64-128MB. It has only been recently that 2GB sticks went from exotic server stuff to mainstream.
Speed also isn't getting faster as fast as capacity is growing. Compare how many seconds it would take a 1990 vintage 486 to write to every memory location vs a modern machine. Same goes for disk access. Hibernation on a modern laptop is pretty much a dead issue since the time to write the whole memory load to disc is unworkable.
Democrat delenda est
955 Black Edition
I saw it to say
955 Brick Edition
Which I think is a CPU I would prefer to stay away from...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm sure this will create a nice marketing myth for AMD that will sell a bunch of chips.
Slashdot is where stupid people go to appear smart.
/b/ is where smart people go to appear stupid.
I stopped at this point, violently threw up, and now thanks to you I'm going to have to wash the mental image of Hillary making a pegging video out of my brain with a bullet.
applications rather than "gamers and hobbyists" whatever that means, and make significant progress towards manycore architectures. Whether or not they have a Larrabee type x86 architecture in the pipeline, or whether they focus on GPGPU based architectures with FireStream, I think that's where their main focus will lie in the years to come. That, along with improving the programming model for these architectures.
... - for cooling or anything else - be sure to install an oxygen level alarm.
A nitrogen leak will dilute the oxygen content of the air to the point that you'll pass out - then die - without noticing what is happening.
Nitrogen is the bulk of normal air so it has no smell. Your breathing is controlled by the CO2 level, not the oxygen content, so you don't notice it when both are being diluted (and the dilution of the CO2 slows your breathing, exacerbating the problem with the oxygen level.)
This made evolutionary sense because the O2 and CO2 level are normally related - CO2 goes up as oxygen is consumed - and the CO2 level starts from a low baseline and affects pH, making it FAR easier to detect. But it doesn't work very well when people start taking the atmosphere apart into its components and remixing them differently.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Uh, was it just me that felt a bit embarrased when reading this blurb? :-/ That AMD is still stuck trying to convince people about "MHz Are Super-important", when Intel gave up on that idea quite a while ago? Maybe it can still sway some amateur users that see a "7 GHz" number and start drooling, but for an IT professional like me, this sounds more like they're out of the loop, and I doubt that's the message they're trying to convey. :-(
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Hi, dumbass.
Could someone help me? I just tried licking my processor, and now I can't get unstuck...
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I rarely find myself in need of a LOT more speed and most of the apps available cannot even take advantage of the cores that I have. I would love to see people focus on a power/power equation where they try to coax the most from benchmarks from the least amount of power required.
It would be infinitely more interesting and much more timely.
Oh Snap!
... how long till we're able to capture the heat from processors and use them to cut power requirements for computers exponentially?
Look up the second law of thermodynamics.
Power goes in on the "work" side of the Carnot Cycle and comes out on the "heat" side. You can salvage a small percentage by running the heat through a heat engine on the way to the heat sink - more if you let the chip get hotter. But not a lot.
Further, the current technology can't stand being allowed to heat up - and its power consumption per unit of computation goes UP when it gets hotter. So even if you COULD put a bottleneck in the cooling (where you're normally spending more power to pump the heat away faster) to try to salvage some of the energy, you'll be running at a net loss.
Now if somebody wants to use ceramic, high temperature metal alloys, and low work-function oxides to build integrated circuits based on vacuum-tube technology they might be able to get away with it. But electrons tend to be even larger and fuzzier in vacuum than in condensed matter so you might not be able to get your scale down to that of even current integrated circuits, limiting your speed due to signal propagation time.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Very few people actually need to crunch numbers - which is pretty much all high GHz chips are any good for.
Looking back to old PCs I built, I'd choose the CPU first - then just bits around it to make the CPU work (the endless procession of beige plastic boxes I randomly bought to house these machines still litter attics of my family as they were cast off).
Gaming is the only thing that needs power, and when building a gaming system the CPU requirement is "high enough for it not to be the bottleneck holding back the GPU".
Final point would be if you look at how PCs are sold now. It used to be the manufacturer would have 1, maybe 2 ranges and prices would scale with the CPU (and whatever you bought, it came in the same beige box). Almost like cars now, each manufacturer has a brand, then they have models in the brand. The models come in a few standard versions, but they'll attempt to upsell you on the minutiae of bells and whistles available to bolt on. You probably don't need most of those things you checked boxes for, you wouldn't really notice the difference if they weren't there, but like metallic point, you'll just add it on as it's only a bit more.
I think this all officially started when manufacturers started offering laptops in different colours. It wasn't about specs any more.
There are obviously still those obsessed with having the fastest machine out there, but that's more for the brand image. We've all got PCs - but how many of us are typing this on the mythical l337 ninja-rig? Nah - we're all typing on good enough systems, and tomorrow we'll go to work in our good-enough cars (and possible ponder a Ferrari purchase, before reality kicks in).
That is sort of funny - aggressive penis hunting pedo groups. Just the sort of thing to scare soccer moms.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
In not really wanting a faster machine? The last two decades, I've been eager to upgrade my machine, so I could get stuff done faster. Now... everything is fast enough. Compiles and even rendering take only moments. I can re-encode video faster than I play it. And I've been chased away from using PCs for games by all the bugs, patches, DRM, and expenses.
Maybe once I upgrade from XP I'll desperately want a faster processor.
And then there's that Intel cache overrun SMM code promotion bug we talked about yesterday. Unless AMD has an equivalent problem Intel might be in trouble once the crackers get to exploiting it against Windows boxen.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
From TFA:
To cool a PC for 90 minutes requires 250 liters of liquid helium inside a aluminum vat the "size of a VW Beetle,"
Once again the "technical" journalism community reminds us of that indispensable unit of volume measurement, the Volkswagen Beetle. As a purist, however, I must ask if that is in "new" Beetles or "old" Beetles.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
He made a funny, lighten up.
On a related note, is there some way to filter out users with a >1.5M UID?
That's really impressive. Quite the achievement. You should be proud. I've only done close to 400% with my metals holdings since I got them in 2002. Ya, I know, pitiful. I'll learn someday how to be such a savvy trader as you. Perhaps you have a newsletter?
The bigger issue, here, is that cycles are getting cranked out faster than it's useful (or are getting to the point where an increase in speed is useless). Here's a little equation for you:
(speed of light)*(1/(7 GHz))
That solves to 4.282 cm. That's 1.6 in for people who don't speak metric. In the time that the processor does a single clock cycle, light in a vacuum can only go 4.282 cm. Electrons on a circuit can't propagate a voltage any further/faster than that.
That law explicitly applies only to closed systems. However, because there is no possible way to fully close any system that law does not apply in full to approximately%100 of all applications.
In other words it is really useful as a rule of thumb for seeing if one's calculations are correct , but cannot be used as a proof.
Amateurs!
I have installed Debian Zombie on my dead badger: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040405/badger.shtml
Does anybody know the details of the i7 running at 8.22ghz on overclocking record database?
http://www.ripping.org/index.php
And how fast have people gotten these things going using water-based systems?
s/sort of/extremely/
It was just a stupid throwaway meme troll, but the fact that Oprah took it seriously is hilarious. She's supposed to be a cultural trend-setting leader, yet she clearly doesn't understand the internets at all. It raises broader questions about exactly how much research goes into establishing "facts" stated on the show.
nine THOUSAAaaaaaaAND!!!
(Eight Thousand in the original Japanese...)
Bow-ties are cool.
bah, AMD have nothing on my friend here:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1351232
Yeah, it totally sounded like an Anonymous troll. Anon delivers yet again.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Pfft. Whatever. I found PLENTY of comedy in that statement.
Oops!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Haha, so true.
You just got troll'd!
>>27694049
>>27694067
samefag
You just got troll'd!
---- <-joke
O
-|- <-you
/ \
Your breathing is controlled by the CO2 level, not the oxygen content, so you don't notice it when both are being diluted
No sorry, unless you have chronic respiratory problems (like chronic heavy bronchitis), you both sens O2 and CO2 level.
The whole "CO2 only is detected" concerns people whose lungs are so much damaged that they have permanently a lower O2 level and their body has adjusted and doesn't notice the hypoxia anymore. CO2-level is what keeps them breathing.
And I'm not saying this only as someone who has studied physiology (IAAMD) but also as someone who has a light anemia and is slightly more sensitive to O2-level. I can personally attest that, yes, indeed, as long as you have normal lungs the O2-level matters.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Sounds like a good candidate for testing the water cooling block designs I have in mind. Gotta love having your own CNC machine. :3
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Excellent. I look forward to my motherboard being less than 2 inches in every dimension.
Damn, we better go post another message on Opera's forums to correct this mistake!
I love my X4 920/Biostar 790GX. It's cool and quiet, and encodes music and video at 1/4 price of i7.
its power consumption per unit of computation goes UP when it gets hotter
Could you elaborate on that?
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Only few years behind IBM, not too bad AMD, you might be a real competitor one day in the high clock chip market.
IBM has been shipping actual 5GHz POWER chips since 2007, that's not over clocked they are rated at 5GHz. The over-engineering of the POWER6 series with very careful consideration of power bus and clock distribution means that overclocking them extremely is straight forward. But I don't know what upper limit people have reached because there is not a huge community of mainframe and super computer overclockers.
Of course 7GHz is still way faster than 5GHz, and unless IBM is willing to simply try their chips at that speed and take the crown away from AMD I think they will just have to concede that they have beaten.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
From TFA ...
The attack works best on a Linux system with an Intel DQ35 motherboard with 2GB of memory. It turns out that Linux allows the root user to access MTR registers incredibly easily. With Windows this exploit can be used, but requires much more work and skill and so while the Linux exploit code is readily available now, no Windows exploit code has, so far, been released or seen
But hell, don't let FACTS get in the way of your anti-MS ranting !
... did they absorb in the attempt?
Consider the following:
Your goal is to dissipate heat from the various components in your computer. If, instead of dissipating the heat into the air as per usual, you dissipate it using the suggested technology and lead the generated electricity back to the PSU you would decrease your net consumption from the grid (ie. not violating physics). The decrease though is probably not very big. Without any facts at hand at all regarding efficiancy of the heat-to-electricity (HTE) conversion I would pull a number out of my ass and say that you could, hopefully, decrease your net consumtion on the order of singles of percents (ie. <<10%). This does however also require that the HTE elements to dissipate heat from the components efficiently enough to keep your components cool. Also, as long as it does not require more energy (read electricity) to drive the process of making the excess heat to usable electricity in the computer, where inconsitent voltages and whatnot could be deal breakers, it's all sun and baby giggles.
While this is mostly a fun thought experiment for stationary computers, it could possibly make a difference for portable devices and their battery life. It could also, if the tech can be made small and efficient enough, be integrated into batteries such that they can recharge, albeit slowly, if not being discharged and warm enough (ie. not charging off of the heat discharge from the device itself).
Just my $.02 and if for no other reason it would be fun to try something like it =)
I always used to have AMD in the past 10 years, but now I own an i7.
I am not a fanboy of any brand, but I have to say that we NEED AMD. I hope they get better and better, or WE (the consumers) are going to suffer with yet another monopoly (that is always very dangerous for us, mere mortals)...
AMD is keeping intel on it's toes and keeping the prices lower. It is acomplishing the same in relation to nVidia.
I thank them...
Yeah, that's what I'm seeing. As if cooling a CPU to temperatures only expressed in Kelvin proved anything. Let us all go around flaunting the fact that our processors can run at some insane clock speed if we had the money to afford liquid nitro.
AMD going belly up for so long now?
Companies have bad times. That is nowhere near the same as going belly up.
So, for all that you say you like AMD and maybe want to buy their stock, you come across as a shill.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
stockholders are the reason any company exists?
And you sell for AIG and Madoff, I suppose?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I expect we only saw the tip of the iceberg yesterday.
Look for holes the size of VW bugs in i7.
Money doesn't buy you a pass to break mathematical laws.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
What part of "once the crackers get to exploiting it against Windows boxen" is so difficult to understand?
The exploit is a motherboard logic chip issue for one core logic chip set. That's why it's not going to be a market-crashing problem for Intel.
This is not a Linux v. Microsoft issue at all. It's an Intel motherboard issue. I think you're both wrong to some extent, but you're far more wrong than Ungrounded Lightning. Linux just makes it easier for someone who is already the administrative user on the box to access the box. It doesn't make it easier for someone to become the administrative user who wasn't already.
Once Windows exploit code is available, the news will be worse for Intel. That's because it will affect many more Intel customers who have the board. Duh.
It still won't be catastrophic. The Pentium division bug didn't kill them, the Pentium IV didn't kill them, and this certainly isn't a bigger problem than those.
..but does it run Linux?
It seemed more anti-Linux to me, as in, "It isn't a real problem until it affects Windows."
I honestly feel that if my next computer doesn't have AMD hardware in it, everyone's favorite CPU underdog will go under.
Reading in a previous post, they haven't been paying out dividends since April '95, it just can't be good for business.
Nicely said.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
You appear to be full of yourself. Is that how you wish others to think of you?
But, seriously, what do you understand of value?
As opposed to perceived value, for example.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
... which seems to me to be a good reason to buy AMD processors even if the shilly sills are right about "only $200 more to get [ponies]" bit.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
its power consumption per unit of computation goes UP when it gets hotter
If I understand this correctly:
With currently deployed technologies the structures are so small (compared to the wavelength of an electron) that a major component of power consumption is leakage. In a process I've been using lately (copper interconnect, 65-nm features), leakage amounts to HALF the power consumption.
Higher temperatures means more thermal excitation of the electrons, which means more leakage, which means more power consumption from leakage. This ramps rapidly, so it's the dominant mechanism for changing power consumption.
(Now that copper interconnects and lower voltages have gotten things to a size where leakage is dominant, vendors are working on tricks to improve this fraction in later generations - including at least one already deploying.)
(Leakage dominance is also why you don't currently see as much work on slowing clocks to save power as you might expect, though we could finally afford the logic and software to do it. If you STOPPED them you'd only save HALF of it. You have to power down a core to get the rest of the savings, which means you can't bring it back up quickly later because the dynamic state is lost. Again this might change in a generation or two.)
Higher temepratures also increase the resistance of the conductors, though the same number of electrons need to be conducted to raise or lower the voltage. So again you burn more power when temperature goes up.
With these two mechanisms being so large you don't even need to look at what's going on with things like transistor switching speed variations with temperature.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way