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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.'"

8 of 147 comments (clear)

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

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

  2. 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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    - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
    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:-40C by by+(1706743) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Negative Kelvin is actually possible...

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

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

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

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