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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."
I like AMD too, they've always been affordable, have pretty powerful chips, and amazing customer support. I picked up a Phenom 9550 around the time they hit the market, and either the mainboard or the CPU was flawed. I called them up, told them my trials, they sent me a new one within a week.
Now, concerning the AMD/Intel battle that's going on. I'd have to say that Intel would be in for a bunch of monopoly lawsuits if AMD were to ever go belly up. It's really in there best interests to maintain competition.
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.
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.
GPUs are where the real action is. Look at video games ten years ago. Then look at Left 4 Dead on a GTX280. WOW.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The mhz argument is lame. The difference between the top-end 486 of 1990 and a top-end 1ghz athlon is similar to the difference between that same top-end 1ghz athlon and a top-end Corei7 right now. That 1ghz athlon is one core; while a corei7 (to set aside the vast improvement of a single core) has 4 and soon 6.
Mhz isn't everything, it does generate a LOT of heat; which is why Netburst didn't scale up to 10ghz well like Intel thought it would. I think you lack the understanding of how fast modern CPUs are and you're still clinging to the mhz argument (which is really lame).
Nothing needs more than 2 or 4 gigs of ram in the normal desktop market. The SPEED of the RAM is growing. Tri-channel DDR3 is pretty impressive
I find your arguments very ignorant and uninformed.
Are you serious? CPUs are doing a lot more per clock than they did in the past. In case you haven't noticed the sort of invisible 4ghz wall that we've been staring up at for the past 4 or 5 years, clock speeds actually have stayed pretty constant but raw performance as measured by benchmarks and such has been improving drastically - look at Core i7 benchmarks vs Core 2 Duo, or Phenom II vs Phenom vs Athlon X2. Really though, most people don't need more processing power than what a 2ghz dual core provides, if that, so it seems like things aren't improving, but they really have been making significant strides each year.
I do agree on the hibernation bit though; it takes forever for my laptop's 3gigs to get written to disk. Now I just resort to sleep mode in Vista, which actually works, so it's not too big of an issue.
All your base are belong to Wii.
They're far from dead. Their phenom II is another great offering:
I can either:
1) ditch my existing AM2+ motherboard, and buy one of those fancy $300 X58 boards, then ditch my perfectly good 8GB of fast DDR2 and replace it with DDR3 at twice the price or more, and then to get noticeably faster real-world performance than the sub-$200 Phenom II X4 940, I'd have to get something like a Core i7 940 at $600. Total expense over $1000 (even more in $CAD, then add taxes, shipping and all)
or
2) Spend the ~$200 on the said Phenom II X4 940, which I can probably get shipped overnight for like $20, drop it on my current board, and have more than acceptable performance -- for like $1000 less.
Very easy choice for a LOT of us. Not everyone can afford that high-end i7 stuff, and don't need the extreme performance either.
Actually, we used 12oz cans of golden liquid to barter with when all the stores were closed.
When the shit hits the fan, booze and cigarettes are the currency of the day. Ammo is too if it lasts more than a few months.
You need more oxygen than it does. Really, an oxygen detector isn't that expensive. Neither is overkill ventilation. And for small experiments, you just ignore the problem -- at a kilogram per cubic meter (roughly), you'd have to boil off more than a liter of the stuff to cause a problem as long as you're not working in a well-sealed closet.
That ain't true! Company gets monopoly only when there is not a single competitor on that market.
That is patently false. Under that definition, Microsoft never had a monopoly on PC Operating Systems, because at any point in time you've had DR-DOS, OS/2, 386BSD, Linux, etc available. I don't think there was ever only a Microsoft operating system available.
From Wikipedia: In economics, a monopoly (from Greek monos , alone or single + polein , to sell) exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it. The key here is "sufficient control". Microsoft, through its position, had enough clout to effectively lock out competitors (by altering the pricing for OEMs who don't sell enough windows boxes), and Intel also had (and, really, still has) enough pull in the PC market to exert that sort of influence if it so chooses (irrespectively of whether they do, or did).
Legal definition may vary a bit from there, but US antitrust bears out these principles.