Pentium 4 Overclocked to 7.1GHz, Sets World Record 392
Netmonger writes "This Japanese guy
overclocked a Pentium 4 to 7.132GHz!! The system managed to calculate pi to 1 million decimal places in 18.516 seconds, setting the world's record." The article notes that a Pentium 4 had been overclocked faster earlier this year, but at that speed it was not possible for the machine to function beyond BIOS. Of course, they'd yet to try diverting power from the dilthium crystal reactor to the deflector array.
That's cool but (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That's cool but (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Booting Windows XP (Score:2, Interesting)
Or did you think all of the data was stored in your L2 cache?
Yeah but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:World record? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dry Ice Slot (Score:5, Interesting)
You want that render to finish before lunch? Just slide in a brick of dry ice and watch the steam come out the sides as your motherboard's temperature sensor gives the go-ahead to crank the clock up to 7 GHz.
AMD64 (Score:2, Interesting)
Or does it already exist?
All I know is I see all these liquid nitrogen P4s and think "wtf...where's amd?"
Re:But.,. (Score:5, Interesting)
athlon 2400+ using FASTPI 1M places in 4.4 secs (Score:4, Interesting)
"18.516 must be wrong. My athlon 2400+ did
1 million places of PI using FASTPI in 4.4 secs.
Maybe the number should read 1.8516 secs.
That would be more in line with factors of
speed differences between my 2400 and
the P4 system."
Re:World record? (Score:2, Interesting)
Calculating pi is a series of mathematical operations where you can't do the next one without the prior because you need the remainders.
That's not entirely true. There exists a digit-extraction [wolfram.com] algorithm for computing pi [wolfram.com] starting at the nth digit, without the need to compute any other digits. The only catch is that it only works on base 16.
Re:World record? (Score:1, Interesting)
Since mathematica's performance for this algorithm is directly related to clock speed, I'd expect to see something like 3 seconds for that clock speed, and even faster for optimised code
Re:Hahaha... (Score:2, Interesting)
If the clock period is less than the propagation delay of the transistors in the processor, the processor will not meet its critical deadlines, and the results will be unstable.
However.
If that was the case, I doubt it would be able to run much at all, let alone an operating system.
Re:In related news.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:actual link (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:That's cool but (Score:2, Interesting)
With todays procs such an overclock might get a stifiled yawn from most people. But at the time that was pretty significant. I was limited from pushing it further only by the type of RAM I was running. In retrospect exotic ram and cooling would have probably let me push it alot further.
The Tualatins were the most hardy and mature of the P3 line. Their life in the marketplace was cut short by the fact that clock for clock they could run circles around the first gen of Pentium4's running RDRam. Intel saw the writing on the wall, and not wanting to compete with itself, plans to take the Tualatins all the way to 2Ghz using DDR-Ram (rumored) were scrapped.
In the end its not the processor that failed but the motherboard. Seems that pushing a system so far for so long does has its limitations. I was in the middle of transferring files from that computer over to another when the Tualatin system critical BSOD'd on me. Upon reboot I could still get into bios, but I quickly discovered it was a fatal BSOD, as both my IDE channels were gone. I could have easily got a non-Intel based replacement mobo, but there was no point in it as I was entrenched into the Athlon craze and had moved on several generations by that point.
I ended up harvesting and parting out all the usable components, except for the processor itself, and old blue (named for its clear blue case) now resides, collecting dust, in my parents basement.
The future is asynchronous! (Score:4, Interesting)
The real future is asynchronous CPUs, that are actually clockless. They generate much less heat and consume much less power. The only reason that they aren't replacing the current batch of chips fast, is that all chip design and testing processes are built around clocked CPUs.
A few articles on the subject:
- Will Self-timed Asynchronous Logic Rescue CPU Design? [embedded.com]
- Computer Chips Without Clocks [transentric.com]
Re:World record? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Designed to run at 7Ghz? (Score:3, Interesting)
So the devil's in the transistors and trace losses. I wonder how this will pan out at 65nm... smaller transistors are potentially faster but they have to be large enough to drive the nets and the loads these nets represent scale less than linearly with process technology. Static power is also likely to increase substantially.
I would not be surprised if phase-change cooling became common within the next 10 years, along with CPUs designed and manufactured specifically to run in sub-zero environments for the mid/high-end. I am having a hard time imagining progress much beyond 65nm (maybe 45nm) without phase-change: leakage, conduction losses, thermal noise and other temperature-dependent parameters will be major show-stoppers. Getting closer to atomic transistors is trimming noise and leakage tolerances.
Well, someone could be even more "crazy stupider" and repeat the experiment using either liquid helium (much more expensive than nitrogen) or hydrogen (kinda flammable/explosive)... they could probably reach 8.5GHz this way.
Not really. Plouffe is behind it mainly. (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.google.fr/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=htt
Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't about winning ... (Score:3, Interesting)
The other reason the bomb was used is the usual simple one: Because the US military had it. They had a new toy and were happy to still have a reason to use it.
And BTW: Nagasaki was an "accident". Well, sort of. The sky wasn't clear and the bombers couldn't see groung zero clearly and had strikt orders not to drop in that case. But the pilot couldn't open a valve on a fuel tank on the bomber, so they still had to drop the heavy bomb in order to make it back to base.