Posted 08/29/08 at 11:44:31 AM by Paul Lilly

Intel fans be polite and stifle those snickers, but at the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, members of AwardFabrik.de managed to breach 4GHz on an AMD Phenom 9950 processor using liquid nitrogen cooling. Not without controversy, the feat failed to pass CPU-Z's validation.

Running at precisely 3952MHz, the team recorded a 19.954 second SuperPi 1M time, setting a new record for AMD processors. Other hardware used in the endeavor included a Foxconn A79-S motherboard and an OCZ 1KW power supply.

On a related side note, SuperPi may find itself being replaced as processor technology moves forward. While the world record for AMD CPUs now sits at just under 20 seconds, the record for an Intel processor is 7.14 seconds using an E8600 overclocked to 6376MHz, leaving little headroom for future record breaking attempts.

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Posted 07/14/08 at 11:13:53 AM by Paul Lilly

British tech news site The Register claims to have taken a peek at some IBM internal documents detailing the company's upcoming Power7 chip. If the report holds true, the new chips will sport eight cores per processor and some "very, very large IBM boxes based on the chip."

It gets even better. According to the report, the internal documents show the octocore Power7 being arranged in dual-chip modules, or 16 cores per module. That translates to a combined 256 gigaflops of performance, roughtly twice as much as today's Power6 parts. Still haven't satiated your server fetish? Picture four of the Power7 processor in a 2U system, which equates to 64 cores hitting 2 teraflops. Mmmm.

The Register says IBM will ship the 45nm Power7 processors clocked at 4GHz in 2010.

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