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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.'"

15 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)
  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.

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

    Negative Kelvin is actually possible...

  6. 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
  7. 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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    My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
  8. 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.

  9. 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)

     

  10. 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
  11. 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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  12. 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.