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."

Comments

Honestly though

[moniker127]

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.

Re:Honestly though

[Kjella]

Who cares what kind of rates you can get with a vat of liquid nitrogen on the damned thing?

It's usually more honest. Despite what their release schedule says, the CPU producers don't get even increases in speed of 100MHz. New architectures often makes for big bumps, but if they maxed it immediately they could only sell the big bump once and they don't want that. Sometimes they got headroom, sometimes they're pushing the last MHz out of the chip to keep a steady release of slightly faster processors for a healthy profit and steady cash stream. These tests push the chips to their real maximum, making it very tough to throw up a marketing smokescreen. If your chip isn't overclocking well or at all, you're in deep shit. This is basicly just showing off that the architecture is good and got room to grow, nothing more.

Great, until...

[Rayeth]

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).

Re:How little progress we are making

[Lord Ender]

GPUs are where the real action is. Look at video games ten years ago. Then look at Left 4 Dead on a GTX280. WOW.

Re:How little progress we are making

[i.of.the.storm]

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.