[HN Gopher] Core I9 14900KF Breaks World Record, Almost Achieves...
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       Core I9 14900KF Breaks World Record, Almost Achieves 9.1GHz (2023)
        
       Author : EveryPizza
       Score  : 91 points
       Date   : 2024-03-24 01:39 UTC (21 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
        
       | gnabgib wrote:
       | October 2023... and that typo..                 The team was able
       | to achieve a very impressive 9043.92GHz
        
         | m463 wrote:
         | if you want to properly make light of it, you have to say
         | 480000Ghz
         | 
         | (a literal joke, since visible light is 480 thz)
        
         | sourcecodeplz wrote:
         | Dunno what happened but way in the day tomshardware writers
         | were very knowledgeable and quite witty + smart too. Guess it
         | got sold? I can't pronounce the name of more than 80% of their
         | writers now.
        
           | fxtentacle wrote:
           | The writer in question seems to be a freelancer who started
           | working with them in August 2023, meaning he was pretty new
           | to Tomshardware when he published this in October.
           | 
           | Looks like the usual cost cutting where you replace employees
           | with contractors.
           | 
           | Also, this entire article is based on an Asus advertisement
           | video on YouTube. I'm sure they wouldn't put their best
           | writers on that kind of content.
        
           | AlecSchueler wrote:
           | > I can't pronounce the name of more than 80% of their
           | writers now.
           | 
           | What does this mean? Only those with Anglo-Saxon heritage
           | make for good writers?
        
             | BenjiWiebe wrote:
             | Anglo-saxon names would make it more likely that English is
             | their first language (and therefore more likely to be
             | fluent), which is the language used in these articles.
             | 
             | A bit of a stretch though.
        
               | AlecSchueler wrote:
               | I'm not sure that's true.
               | 
               | Firstly because countries like the US are home to many
               | native English speaking people with non-Saxon names, and
               | countries like Ireland in the old world speak English
               | while retaining their native names.
               | 
               | Secondly because many people who learn English as a
               | second language grow up be fluent and can write with
               | ease. I look to places like the Netherlands where
               | students from all over the world are writing theses for
               | their higher education completely in English.
               | 
               | It's not that hard to write in your second language,
               | certainly not to the point that your name could be in any
               | way an indicator of your skill level.
        
               | ithkuil wrote:
               | It's certainly easier to write well in your second
               | language than to speak it well!
        
       | underlogic wrote:
       | Waste of sand. You want liquid nitrogen on your desk? Where's the
       | utility?
        
         | htag wrote:
         | It's liquid helium, which I imagine just evaporates into the
         | air.
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | Although, wouldn't liquid nitrogen also evaporate? The
           | atmosphere has lots of nitrogen.
        
             | olliej wrote:
             | The bigger issue is that helium is a functionally finite
             | resource, and does not remain in the atmosphere (at least
             | IIRC it literally just floats up until it gets blown into
             | space).
             | 
             | The bigger local issue you run into with liquid helium and
             | liquid nitrogen is having it evaporate in an enclosed
             | space. You can "easily" create an environment leading to
             | inert gas suffocation (a real hazard in some industrial
             | cases) - in reality any simple case like this is unlikely
             | to be using enough of N or He, and is unlikely to be
             | sufficiently enclosed, but in principle it would be
             | possible - maybe if you were in a basement and spilled an
             | inexplicably large thermos of them it could do it.
        
               | lathiat wrote:
               | You can definitely cause problems by spilling an entire
               | dewer into a smaller room.
               | 
               | Had to calculate this for the safety part of a LAN party
               | event application. Fortunately we had a very big room.
        
               | olliej wrote:
               | Dewer! thanks, I knew there was an actual name for those
               | heavy duty thermoses but it completely escaped me :D
        
               | BenjiWiebe wrote:
               | Dewar, actually. Originally Dewar flask, after Sir James
               | Dewar.
        
         | apantel wrote:
         | It's a sport. It's like drag racing. Nobody is going to drive a
         | drag racer to work, but that's not the point of the car.
        
           | arcanemachiner wrote:
           | Waste of cars. You want liquid nitromethane on your roads?
           | Where's the utility?
        
             | olliej wrote:
             | liquid nitromethane commuting? in this economy? :D
        
               | oorza wrote:
               | "In this economy" snark? In this economy?
        
           | rgmerk wrote:
           | But at least drag racing is a spectacle. Not my thing, but it
           | is a spectacle.
           | 
           | This? You push a button and a number comes up.
        
             | lostlogin wrote:
             | Benchmarking hardware has been a thing forever, and applies
             | to a vast swathe of things. Graphics cards, ram, hard
             | drives, network cards etc.
             | 
             | Then you look further and see that it's done with coffee
             | machines, motors (of all sorts), and just about any other
             | device you can find, make or name.
             | 
             | Wanting a fast/strong/powerful/quick X is a fairly common
             | thing for many of us.
        
             | steve_rambo wrote:
             | Are you sure you haven't visited _hacker_ news by mistake?
             | 
             | Hardware overclocking requires a decent amount of
             | knowledge, most of it obtainable only through months of
             | trial and error, and a lot of tuning to push dozens of
             | often conflicting parameters just right. Extreme
             | overclocking requires that much more. If what they're doing
             | is simply "pushing a button", then programming and system
             | administration can be reduced to that too, along with many
             | other things.
             | 
             | You simply can't get full performance from modern systems
             | without some amount of overclocking, and things like PBO
             | and XMP/EXPO profiles are far from what your hardware can
             | achieve because they have to be very conservative, or many
             | systems won't run without additional manual tuning, which
             | most consumers won't do.
             | 
             | (Except for closed systems like Apple's where your hardware
             | doesn't belong to you and you can't change anything
             | anyway.)
             | 
             | So one immediate thing overclockers provide are general
             | guidance on what you can expect to achieve and what thing
             | to tune which way to get close to maximum performance from
             | your hardware without spending months on it like they did.
             | I heavily rely on such information. My system would be at
             | least 25% slower if not for these "button pushers".
        
               | underlogic wrote:
               | I wouldn't trust an overclocked system as a server or to
               | compile. Especially not long term w degradation. Can't
               | use it for CAD bc it'll mess up the PCIe timings I think.
               | Looks like a giant waste of time and money to me, but
               | sure to each their own. I bet it's difficult, but seems
               | also pointless. If they were really knowledgeable they'd
               | get out an FPGA and go design their own SoC instead of
               | filing down intel's for a speed bump. Just not relevant
               | today
        
       | tomohelix wrote:
       | Look to me a significant amount of engineering went into making
       | sure the chip can withstand the amount of power it is drawing.
       | Basically a desperate move by Intel to keep their outdated design
       | from being completely smoked by AMD.
        
         | fortran77 wrote:
         | Intel isn't worried about AMD. They're worried about Arm.
        
           | arcticbull wrote:
           | Intel is getting attacked from all sides.
           | 
           | AMD has raised their market share over the last 4-5 years
           | from about 8% to 31% of x86 sales. Intel also saw 5 straight
           | years of market share declines against AMD in the server
           | space - which is by far the most lucrative.
           | 
           | And yes, they're _also_ worried about ARM and Nvidia.
        
           | nolok wrote:
           | More than half of Intel's revenue come from desktop and
           | laptop chips, and that's the segment that's being eaten the
           | fastest, and the one doing the eating is AMD.
           | 
           | ARM is another threat on the horizon on that front, but it's
           | nothing compared to the beating AMD has been giving them
           | since the Ryzen showed up.
        
             | aurareturn wrote:
             | It's true. It's hard to see how Intel can catch up to Apple
             | and AMD in the client and server space respectively.
             | 
             | However, I still own a substantial amount of Intel stocks
             | because it will be one of the most valuable company in the
             | world if China uses military action against Taiwan. If not,
             | then I still believe Intel will be successful with their
             | IFS strategy because the world is about to enter an era
             | where compute will never be enough and designers want a
             | second supplier next to TSMC.
        
               | Aromasin wrote:
               | I'm also backing that investment thesis. I don't have
               | hopes for Intel being anything but a budget alternative
               | in terms of their client and datacentre products, but the
               | foundry business is only going to grow as more players
               | join the gold rush that is compute power, and they're
               | going to be the ones selling the picks.
        
               | Detrytus wrote:
               | Well, give it 1-2 more years and they will leapfrog TSMC
               | with their manufacturing process. 18A is allegedly still
               | on track, and Intel is also getting into foundry
               | business, I can totally imagine NVIDIA switching to Intel
               | for their next-gen GPUs for example. That, combined with
               | worries about China attacking Taiwan makes me bullish on
               | Intel stock.
        
               | aurareturn wrote:
               | I doubt they leap frog TSMC. 18A will come out around the
               | same time as N2. I have more confidence that TSMc's N2
               | will perform better and be in far higher volume and yield
               | rate.
               | 
               | 20A is sort of Intel's first foray. 18A is really their
               | serious node.
               | 
               | If you think Intel has a chance to leap TSMC, it will
               | come at the 14A node but you have to bet that TSMC is
               | wrong to stay with low NA.
        
               | formerly_proven wrote:
               | Their process strategies lined up at final gen DUV and
               | 1st gen EUV, but are divergent for the future: TSMC isn't
               | using high NA EUV for the time being and instead focuses
               | on multi-patterning. Intel is instead trying to push high
               | NA EUV into production first. We will see which works
               | out; they can of course also both achieve success in
               | different ways.
        
               | aurareturn wrote:
               | Given the recent history, it's safer to bet that TSMC
               | knows what they're doing more. It feels like Intel is
               | risking a lot to try to win back the crown. Hence, I
               | believe in TSMC's more.
        
               | Detrytus wrote:
               | Given the recent history TSMC is kind of repeating
               | Intel's mistake here: they do not want to pay for new
               | generation of the ASML litography machines (which are
               | like $300M a piece), so they will leverage the last-gen
               | ones and try multi-patterning instead. Didn't work for
               | Intel last time, will end badly for TSMC this time.
        
               | formerly_proven wrote:
               | That seems to be the precedent for this exact situation -
               | iirc both the slight Intel 14nm and the large Intel 10nm
               | delays were due to getting multi-patterning working at
               | scale.
        
               | imtringued wrote:
               | We already live in an era of compute saturation for
               | machine learning. The NPUs that AMD and Intel ship have
               | more compute than the memory bus can handle.
        
               | aurareturn wrote:
               | Explain more? Are you saying we have enough compute but
               | not enough memory?
        
         | nolok wrote:
         | Much better than the time just a few years ago where they tried
         | to show a 28 core 5ghz chip and pretend it was a normal one and
         | got pissed when enthousiast realized they were using insane
         | cooling to get it there.
         | 
         | I'm still baffled by that showing years later. Over-engineered,
         | over-cooled chips to reach absurd speed record has been a
         | staple since as far as I remember, like back in the Pentium 2
         | or before. Why did anyone at Intel think they should hide the
         | sauce, or get pissed when fans got to it, is beyond my
         | comprehension.
        
           | PartiallyTyped wrote:
           | > enthousiast realized they were using insane cooling to get
           | it there.
           | 
           | Didn't they use a chiller?
        
             | nolok wrote:
             | They used a 1700 watt chiller with sub ambient cooling, and
             | a power unit who could pump up to 2000 watts into the CPU.
             | So clearly "record for the show", not "here is what you
             | will buy tomorrow".
             | 
             | Which, taken as the usual world record and cool feat of cpu
             | speed would have been perfectly fine and impressive, but
             | they were getting scared of AMD so for some weird reason
             | some idiot in their PR team insisted on pretending from top
             | to bottom that this was a normal chip running on normal
             | condition, and when Asus (I think ?) let fans see how it
             | was achieved Intel gave them less than 30 minutes to give
             | the chip back.
             | 
             | This was not a great era for Intel ...
        
         | NoPicklez wrote:
         | Not at all really.
         | 
         | The 9Ghz clock was achieved not through any normal cooling or
         | by efficiency of the chip.
         | 
         | These overclocking records have been around for decades but
         | they're in no way shape or form representative of the average
         | of even the top 1% of users.
         | 
         | It's impressive purely because it was possible with an off the
         | shelf chip.
        
       | Klaster_1 wrote:
       | Obligatory soundtrack:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u35crz9xZG4
        
       | bee_rider wrote:
       | I'll always wonder what would have happened if Intel had stuck
       | with Pentium 4 and those incredibly long (31 stages! How we've
       | fallen). Sure, they were power hungry, but at ~100W they don't
       | compare badly to modern chips. And dumping 100 Watts onto a
       | single core is an extremely cool and fun thing to do. I wonder if
       | we could have 10GHz processors for real by now.
        
         | arcticbull wrote:
         | Sorry, why do you say that the P4/Netburst microarchitecture
         | doesn't compare badly to modern chips? Their performance was
         | utter garbage (at the time, and now) which is why the Pentium M
         | architecture (a Pentium III derivative) was used when they
         | built out Core. AMD was spanking them at the time with the
         | K8/Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64 X2.
         | 
         | A super long pipeline allows higher clock rates but it takes a
         | giant dirt nap when branch prediction fails and when you have a
         | cache miss. You end up having massive latencies in these cases.
         | 
         | Further, generally all else being equal a lower clock rate
         | allows you to be more energy efficient.
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | Just in terms of power consumption they don't compare badly.
           | Performance, of course, no comparison, haha.
           | 
           | Agree that it had tons of problems. But branch prediction has
           | gotten better, compilers have gotten better, etc. Maybe they
           | could be handled now!
        
             | smolder wrote:
             | Anything salvageable from the architecture likely has been
             | used again by this point.
        
           | bcrl wrote:
           | The worst part of the P4 was when it went off into la-la land
           | for 4000 cycles of replay. Did you issue a locked
           | instruction? 4000 cycle penalty. Use rep ; movs? 4000 cycle
           | penalty. Some weird internal condition with a misaligned
           | store? 4000 cycle penalty. One could optimize to improve
           | performance in those cases, but the performance glass jaws on
           | the P4 were all consuming.
        
         | xgkickt wrote:
         | (Edit: With modern core counts) I think we'd be seeing
         | partnerships with GE, Whirlpool, Rheem etc ;)
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | Exactly! We barely interact with our dishwashers,
           | refrigerators, and water heaters. We just fill them up and
           | empty them out occasionally. Boring! But we're willing to
           | devote hundreds or thousands of watts to them and dozens of
           | square feet of floor space to them. Computers are much more
           | interesting, therefore they deserve that same appliance
           | treatment.
           | 
           | I'm kidding in these sense that I don't think a single core
           | could be designed to usefully use 1000W. I get why things
           | happened as they did. But I do still think single threaded
           | performance is much more interesting than multi-core, so I
           | wish we could see how those designs would have evolved.
        
             | xgkickt wrote:
             | There's so much waste heat that could be diverted into hot
             | water storage.
        
               | gpderetta wrote:
               | Time for a custom water cooling loop!
        
               | bee_rider wrote:
               | At the time you'd start up your computer, then go make
               | some coffee or tea while it booted. Imagine if that could
               | be combined into one process!
        
       | 0x1ceb00da wrote:
       | Obligatory "it's over 9000!"
       | 
       | https://youtu.be/SiMHTK15Pik?si=0wlPOl7QGVf1zTe8
        
         | nokeya wrote:
         | In-process soundtrack:
         | https://youtu.be/hyNu5i_6lKA?si=fVzH88KRo55L-uG_
        
       | leshokunin wrote:
       | Sick overclock. It's cool to see Intel chips reach such new
       | heights. It felt like we were stuck for 10 years. Hopefully as
       | they get better at manufacturing and shrinking the 5GHz bar can
       | be reliably passed.
        
         | formerly_proven wrote:
         | 5 GHz in off the shelf SKUs was passed years ago.
        
           | leshokunin wrote:
           | Key word is reliably. I don't think we're quite at the stage
           | where the average cpu can sustain 5ghz, especially for longer
           | periods of time?
        
       | Gravityloss wrote:
       | One would think from far away perspective or first principles,
       | that we have passed the point of liquid cooling being way more
       | optimal in the datacenter a long time ago already (if you're
       | actually doing computing and not idling).
       | 
       | But everything's so slow and path dependent.
       | 
       | I wonder how much you could do with a single rack if you got
       | really serious about it. Cooling, power, networking etc.
        
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