AMD Phenom II Quad Core Overclocked to 6.3Ghz

November 24, 2008 by John Messina

Picture courtesy of AMD

(PhysOrg.com) -- AMD has been showing off their soon to be released 45nm "Deneb" desktop chips which have been overclocked to 6.3Ghz. Unless you can get your hands on some liquid nitrogen, don´t expect to overclock this chip to 6.3Ghz. The Phenom II parts were also able to hit 4GHz with air cooling and 5GHz with dry ice cooling.

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AMD stated that the extra level of headroom towards dramatic overclocking capacities on the Phenom II is due to a combination of architectural improvements over the original Phenoms first released late in 2007. In comparison to Intel´s top Core i7 processor listed as a 3.2 GHz part has been overclocked to 4.5 GHz on air cooling alone and some claim to have taken it to 5.7GHz using liquid nitrogen.

AMD states that their design works flawlessly from -200C to +100C. Of course the average person is not going to have access to these kinds of cooling methods but the demo does demonstrate that the new Phenom II processors are scalable when it comes to clock speeds and quite stable at high frequencies. The Phenom II X4 scales much better than the original Phenom X4 processors, which is obvious as they showed overclocking on several different systems with numerous processors.

AMD´s Taylor said the Phenom II demos conducted Thursday were done on what the chip maker is calling its "Dragon" platform which is a quad-core Phenom II processor. The Dragon platform will consist of a Phenom II processor, a Radeon HD 4000 series graphics card and an AMD 790GX chipset powered motherboard. With this platform AMD thinks they can take on Intel in the mainstream market, which they think is critical in this day where the economy is uncertain.

The Phenom II chip is due out sometime in the first quarter of 2009 and will be listed to run at 3.0 GHz off the shelf.

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shyataroo
Nov 21, 2008

Rank: 2.7 / 5 (3)

why dont you see people overclocking ram or Bus speed?

Flakk
Nov 21, 2008

Rank: not rated yet

Good call. Any hardware people out there?

NeptuneAD
Nov 21, 2008

Rank: 4.8 / 5 (6)

Unfortunately advances in CPU design are not mirrored by advances in motherboard design.

Ram or Bus speeds aren't the issue, its the entire transport design, all devices should have fast access to control circuits, instead of a single multiple core CPU, perhaps each area should have its own independent CPU which is connected directly to the main CPU.

What ever happens, one thing is for sure, something needs to be done to get computers out of this rut and into the 64bit era which has been waiting far too long.

Sirussinder
Nov 22, 2008

Rank: 5 / 5 (2)

128 bit would be nice if things got rolling....and yes,,microsoft should only start releasing 64 OS only...

denijane
Nov 25, 2008

Rank: not rated yet

NeptuneAD-could you explain what you mean about the 64bit era? Because my computer claims it is 64bit, and my Linux is 64 bit and I cannot install 32bit Linux on it. So..it looks 64 bit to me!

Back on the Phenom- I don't get what's the point of presenting something so cool and then saying "oh, wait, you cannot reach those without liquid nitrogen". Well, thank you, that's soooo useful.

We're barely managing to keep our Department's computer cluster cooled and it's only 96 CPUs. If AMD is planning to sell that new gorgeous processor to universities, I suggest it develop a coolant system that can be bought and serviced. Sure, it could be ok to cool with nitrogen your super computer if you are a Defence department for the US army, but it's not so ok, when you are a small theoretical department in a university without good financing.

thatguy
Jan 17, 2009

Rank: not rated yet

NeptuneAD is right, the true bottlenecks in our computers are in the interconnects between hardware. We have 3.0GB/sec SATA-2, but can your motherboard do anything with 3GB/sec? Nope. Can your hard disk even pull or write data that fast? Nope. Do you think even the fastest $400 motherboard will know what to do with a quad-core running at 6GHz? You would use less than 10% CPU power at most, i bet.

It's all about buzz words, selling people what they dont need, and driving the demand. Bleeding edge motherboards and controllers can not be invented/designed fast enough, and this CPU race to be the best between intel and amd has left everything else in the dust. Software has some catching up to do, big time.

DeniJane, how many programs do you run in 64-bit? Look again... 90% of what you do on your 64-bit machine runs on an emulated x86 platform. Yes, we have a long ways to go before we see the true potential of 64-bit computing.

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AMD Phenom II Quad Core Overclocked to 6.3Ghz

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