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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."
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.
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
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).
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 personally like using liquid oxygen to cool my pc. It makes running dailies more thrilling knowing that I'm just a few centigrade away from leveling the block.
greed@All_Evils:~#
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.
... - 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
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.
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
I think you've got it backwards - Intel was the Mhz fanboy, while AMD had its work cut out telling people that they had faster processors with a smaller number on the die. Now AMD is saying "hey look - we do more per clock, and our clock goes up to 7000".
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
In addition, there's nothing all that wrong with AMD's latest processors. Shanghai is clocked very fast, and has improved single-threaded IPC decently over Barcelona, and dramatically over the Athlon 64. It almost keeps pace with Core 2 Quad processors, and that's a hell of an improvement.
Sure, you might call it "too little too late" because of Intel's i7, but think about it this way: i7 is a very expensive platform to buy into, with a premium on processors and motherboards. For some applications this premium is well-justified, but for the average user who occasionally watches videos or plays a game, Shanghai is just as good for half the price.
I admit that AMD is screwed on the server arena - anything I/O-bound just loves the i7's triple-channel memory and SMT threads. But in the consumer space, AMD still has a decent product to sell, so they're gonna do whatever it takes to market to budget computer users/enthusiasts.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
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.
Click the link, it's a P4. His i7 topped out at 5.6GHz.
If anything could go that high, it'd be the P4. That ridiculously long pipeline is what they were designed for.
And how much more was your i7 + DDR3 + motherboard than this chip + RAM + mobo? Oh, right... a LOT.
Wow, if you're an MD then I'm scared.
Most people's respiration works on a hypercapnic drive, in other words, when you have a raised blood CO2, respiratory drive increases. Some people with COPD chronically retain CO2 and hence their chemoceptors adjust to the high CO2 level and can no longer drive respiration. They switch to a hypoxic drive whereby hypoxaemia drives respiration. This works, but is less effective than hypercapnic drive and gives rise to the possibility of iatrogenic apnoea when high-flow oxygen therapy is used.
Your statement "CO2-level is what keeps them breathing" is utterly wrong, and if you are an MD then you need to go back to the textbooks and do some reading before you go anywhere near an emergency room or respiratory ward.
An information leaflet might help you understand a bit better.