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Overclocker Pushes Intel Core i7-7700K Past 7GHz Using Liquid Nitrogen (hothardware.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the if-you-can't-stand-the-heat-get-out-of-the-kitchen dept.

MojoKid writes from a report via HotHardware: If you've had any doubts of Intel's upcoming Kaby Lake processor's capabilities with respect to overclocking, don't fret. It's looking like even the most dedicated overclockers are going to have a blast with this series. Someone recently got a hold of an Intel Core i7-7700K chip and decided to take it for an overclocking spin. Interestingly, the motherboard used is not one of the upcoming series designed for Kaby Lake, but the chip was instead overclocked on a Z170 motherboard from ASRock (Z170M OC Formula). That bodes well for those planning to snag a Kaby Lake CPU and would rather not have to upgrade their motherboard as well. With liquid nitrogen cooling the processor, this particular chip peaked at just over 7GHz, which helped deliver a SuperPi 32M time of 4m 20s, and a wPrime 1024M time of 1m 33s. It's encouraging to see the chip breaking this clock speed, even with extreme methods, since it's a potential relative indicator of how much headroom will be available for overclocking with more standard cooling solutions.

3 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Most depressing thing I've read all week by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If I recall correctly, the first time someone got over 8 Ghz was back in ~2004, over a decade ago. I know clock speed isn't everything, but parallelism will only get you so far. I really hope before we get to 5nm chips, we can get some 20 Ghz clock speeds. The amount of work you'll be able to do on a single thread will be amazing.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:Most depressing thing I've read all week by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The only thing inherently inefficient about parallel computing

      Not all things are parallelizable. Sometimes you must wait for part A to finish before part B can begin. The obvious example is anything requiring user input (like games). Another example is databases.....when they wan to maintain ACID, they must do some things sequentially (which is unfortunately a huge bottleneck). See also, Amdahl's law.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Most depressing thing I've read all week by Ramze · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Intel gave up on increasing clock speeds way back when they hit 4Ghz. They hit a wall, and they're done, so I wouldn't expect them to revisit it. That's when they went to multi-core. Every computer does better with dual core over single core. Most do better with quad core than dual core. (because even if a single program isn't compiled for multi-core, different programs can be assigned different cores). With VR tech and GPUs added to the cores, multi-core is likely going to continue to be the area of development for some time. As always, expect new physics and graphics extensions as well as codecs.

      Multi-core means managing the power and speed of each core individually and allowing some to power down while ramping up one or two to keep the thermal and power envelopes within tolerances. The biggest metric for Intel is performance per Watt -- as data centers are concerned about power usage for the machines and the air conditioning systems.

      I don't think there is enough of a market for enthusiasts that want 20 Ghz clock speeds for Intel to bother even doing the research for new materials to pull that off... assuming it's even possible without extreme cooling.