AMD Achieves New
World Record CPU Frequency
We bet you weren’t expecting to see this headline today, but it’s true – AMD’s yet to be released FX processors have already achieved a significant overclocking world record.
About 2 weeks ago, we had the opportunity to fly down to Austin, Texas in order to get briefed on the finer points of AMD’s upcoming and highly anticipated Bulldozer (Zambezi-FX) processors. While we still can’t reveal any particular details about the CPU’s themselves, we can now tell you about this new milestone.
Now AMD have only been testing the extreme overclocking capabilites of the FX processors for about a month, but they were quickly able to determine that these new chips did not appear to have any cold bugs under liquid nitrogen, and this opened the door to something a little more extreme – liquid helium (LHe). The hope was that by improving conductivity and decreasing operating temperatures to a few degrees above absolute zero, they might be able to achieve something amazing with their new microarchitecture…and they did.
With a bunch of media in attendance, some quickly binned processors, and whole lot of liquid helium a supremely capable group made up of Sami (Macci) Mäkinen, Brian (Chew*) McLachlan, Aaron Schradin, Pete Hardman, and Simon Solotko pushed an octo-core FX-8150 (with two cores enabled) to new heights and achieved a new CPU frequency world record of 8429.38 MHz at 2.016V. This surpasses the current record by 119.44 MHz, a Intel Celeron 352 LGA775 chip clocked at 8308.9 MHz, and finally ends the streak of lowly “Cedar Mills” Celerons that have consistently held the title of world’s highest CPU frequency.
This demonstration was somewhat reminiscent of an event at CES 2009 during which Sami Makinen, Sampsa (Sampsa) Kurri, Petri (SF3D) Korhonen, and Pete Hardman used liquid helium to push a just launched Phenom II X4 940 to 6.5GHz, while also casually setting a new 3DMark 05 world record. However, this particular overclocking endeavour was even more important for AMD, because due to this new milestone the AMD FX processor is actually going to be entered into the Guinness Book of World Records. I am convinced that 8.34GHz is just the tip of the iceberg though, these AMD FX processors are going to break the 8.5GHz mark once the manufacturing process improves further. But in the mean time, all that is left is for AMD to actually launch these chips!
If you're interested we have included a healthy assortment of the pictures we took, as well as AMD's own official video of the event. It's definitely worth a few moments of your time to check out.
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