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Intel's Superchilled Test Rig

Posted by timothy on from the now-that's-offsides dept.

Barence writes "Last week, PC Pro issued a challenge to see whose PC could render a 3D graphics benchmark in the shortest time. The competition was won by an entrant with a rather unfair advantage: Intel. The processor giant's superchilled rig is overclocked to nearly 5GHz. As PC Pro explains: 'The rig itself uses phase-change cooling: in other words it's attached to a chuffing great freezer, which I believe is the big box on the right of the photo. That yellow meter with the readout is showing the temperature of its output: yes, that's minus 40 degrees Celcius.'"

10 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Re:AMD by Threni · · Score: 2, Interesting

    According to one of the comments (about AMD winning $1B+ from Intel) they can afford a fairly substantial freezer...

  2. Big advantage? by leachlife4 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Phase change cooling is not really that extreme of a cooling system for benchmarking... go to Quakecon you will see quite a few people with it.
    LN2 (or even better liquid He) on the other hand could be considered an unfair advantage.

  3. Re:-40C by by+(1706743) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Negative Kelvin is actually possible...

  4. Psh, only 29sec here by Fry-kun · · Score: 2, Interesting

    on a 2x6core server at work ;)

    [xxxx@xxxx smallpt]$ time ./smallpt 100
    Rendering (100 spp) 100.00%
    real 0m29.127s
    user 5m41.044s
    sys 0m0.093s

    P.S. and compiling didn't take me hours, either, since I'm on Linux

    --
    Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
  5. You are missing the SECRET AGENDA! by HiggsBison · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Nearly 5GHz". The whole point here that everyone seems to be missing is that they made something go more than 1000 times as fast as the original 4.77 MHz IBM PC.

    Now if they could give it 640MB of memory and a 110MB floppy drive...

    --
    My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
    1. Re:You are missing the SECRET AGENDA! by Korin43 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What's interesting is that 5 Ghz isn't all that impressive a number anymore. People have gotten i5's to 5 Ghz on air.

    2. Re:You are missing the SECRET AGENDA! by gandhi_2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What's interesting is that someone has a job where they can just go grab the latest and greatest intel chip whenever they want to, for free.

      --
      THL phish sticks
    3. Re:You are missing the SECRET AGENDA! by Dogtanian · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "Nearly 5GHz". The whole point here that everyone seems to be missing is that they made something go more than 1000 times as fast as the original 4.77 MHz IBM PC.

      Well, only if you're referring to the clock speed. In terms of raw processing speed (by any reasonable benchmark), they're likely *significantly* more than 1000 times faster, since clock speed refers simply to the number of cycles per second, and doesn't account for how much work can be done per cycle.

      --
      "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
  6. Real Story: Windows Benchmark is Slow by Rob+Riggs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The posts from users running Linux on the forum are showing times that are 4-5x faster than those posting benchmarks from Windows. What's going on there?

    --
    the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
  7. Light speed limit by mangu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Clock speed has reached the ultimate physical limit, light speed.

    If you take a measuring tape to a motherboard and do some math, you'll see that once we got past a few GHz there's no way a bit can go from one chip to the other within one clock cycle.

    The result of that is that chips need local caches and pipelines, etc, until the complexity starts digging into the performance. And power consumption skyrockets.