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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.'"

31 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. In a galaxy far, far away by PmanAce · · Score: 4, Funny

    Judging from that photo, we are still in the infancy of computing. The Millenium Falcon looks like that everywhere!

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    Tired of my customary (Score:1)
    1. Re:In a galaxy far, far away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I believe the politically correct term now is "presidentially-engineered".

    2. Re:In a galaxy far, far away by Curtman · · Score: 2, Funny

      -40 is superchilled? That's what we call "morning" from December through February here.

  2. Re:-40C by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 5, Informative

    -40C is also -40F ... so -40 it is

  3. Correction by Alsee · · Score: 5, Funny

    That yellow meter with the readout is showing the temperature of its output: yes, that's minus 40 degrees celcius.

    Correction, it's minus 40 degrees fahrenheit.

    -

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    1. Re:Correction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Man, everyone else who replied to this comment is a fucking idiot. Stop trying to prove someone else wrong and just get the obvious joke.

    2. Re:Correction by Tridus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This post deserves bonus points for getting so many people to reply while totally missing the joke.

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      -- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
    3. Re:Correction by icebike · · Score: 3, Funny

      Mod parent Swoosh!

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      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  4. in Soviet Russia by FuckingNickName · · Score: 3, Funny

    environment cools Intel.

    1. Re:in Soviet Russia by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 2, Funny

      Shame that it's no longer winter.

  5. 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...

  6. 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.

    1. Re:Big advantage? by mat128 · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you read TFA (but this is /.), it says he used a retail processor. He was also limited to a single-socket solution, which means no multi-sockets server boards.

  7. I'm buying real-estate on Pluto by Tablizer · · Score: 2, Funny

    it will be the happening place for gamers.

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    Table-ized A.I.
  8. Re:-40C by by+(1706743) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Negative Kelvin is actually possible...

  9. 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

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    Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
  10. 4.94 GHz at 1.62V!!! by fontkick · · Score: 2

    Insane voltage... the 980 is rated up to 1.375V. I'm happy with a i7-860 @ 3.6 GHz running on 1.2V.

    Intel's made upgrading much more fun considering you can get a 30-40% CPU speed increase in about 10 minutes of research and bios tweaking. Next fall there will be 8-core/16-threads on the desktop. I am loving Intel these days.

  11. Getting colder... by sznupi · · Score: 5, Funny

    For extra effect, they should put Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" there; also recently frozen.

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    One that hath name thou can not otter
  12. 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...

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    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.

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      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.

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  13. Re:February in Ottawa by Shados · · Score: 2, Informative

    It doesn't get to -40C very frequently in most of the populated (well, more than small villages anyway) regions of canada :). -35 happens, but its far from an average, unless you live all the way north in the middle of nowhere or in the territories.

  14. Re:AMD by TheEyes · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm aware; I've actually invested in some 2012 call options on AMD stock. Even as-is they should be worth $10 a share. If Bobcat can make them competitive in the ultraportable market (Android on ARM is going to eat Intel's lunch in the netbook-level arena; x86's crufty instruction set can't compete at that low level), and/or Bulldozer makes them competitive in the mid- to high-end desktop market, that should go up to $13-15, easy. It is a hell of a gamble, though; they're still almost a full processor node behind Intel, and that's hard to compete with.

  15. Screw yer Giga-hurts nonsense! by sherpajohn · · Score: 2, Funny

    I am more interested a a FPU (food processing unit) than a CPU - how long to render Natalie Portman in hot grits?

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    Going on means going far
    Going far means returning
  16. Windows optimizations by tomz16 · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is something seriously wrong with the optimizations in his windows binary...

    Ran in 36 seconds on a 4 x 8224 SE AMD opteron IBM x-server running linux (8 total cores at 3.2GHz)

     

    1. Re:Windows optimizations by tomz16 · · Score: 2

      Why would you assume that? The engineer from Intel was limited to using a single socket system. I could argue that there is something seriously wrong with your Linux compiled binary since you have 4x as many sockets and ran less than twice as fast.

      and I could argue that you are flat out wrong
      - Intel has 6 cores on the latest architecture running at 5Ghz
      - I had 8 cores that are now 1 generation old, running at 3.2GHz, with slower memory (and cores are a little slower clock-for-clock than the i7)

      but most importantly :
      - most posts from similar hardware show that the people using a linux binary are *several times* faster on identical hardware

      It's pretty clear that the author SERIOUSLY messed up the compilation on windows (also betrayed by the fact that it took him several hours of futzing with visual studio in order to get it to work)

  17. 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?

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    the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
  18. Re:AMD by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here is what AMD was doing last year with liquid helium, which would put the temp at about 5 degrees Kelvin (about -450 degrees Fahrenheit) and running at 7 giga-hertz

    Here is an AMD news blurb
    http://eon.businesswire.com/portal/site/eon/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20091105006606&newsLang=en

    And a nifty video
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6Hf6d404QY&f=22

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    Wherever You Go, There You Are
  19. Poor code for a benchmark by hvdh · · Score: 5, Informative

    I had a 30 minute look at the source code. It's clearly optimized for shortness, not for speed.
    There are some obvious performance no-gos, see lines 44-45, using a double variable as a loop counter.
    Performance depends to a good extent on the erand48 implementation and whether OpenMP knows that erand48 is MT-safe.

  20. 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.