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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"
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.
She's Catholic and rejects daemons, you ignorant clod.
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.
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:~#
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.
... - 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
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.