AMD hits 6.0 GHz, steals Intel’s Core i7 thunder

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Pe-Killer

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During morning hours in US, I was contacted by several high-level executives who asked me is it true that AMD was sold to a private investor.
Timing of such rumor was without any doubt, pure FUD attack to steal the thunder from today’s announcement that got the press and enthusiasts tingly like elementary school girl.
The announcement is expiry of embargo on AMD’s Press Preview, held recently in Austin, Texas. Like I hinted in an article just days ago, AMD worked with selected hard-core overclockers to tune up the Phenom II CPU and Dragon platform (790GX chipset with AM3 socket, nothing earth-shattering here). The results are quite spectacular, to say the least.

AMD decided that the time has come to regain the crown in overclocking, and the company means it. You can thank all of this to several key members of former ATI Technologies, now AMD GPG. I know it is not fair to name the few, since I can’t mention them all, but guys such as Godfrey Cheng, Ian McNaughton, Korhan Eben, Macci, and many unsung heroes combined with old-school AMD executives such as Patrick Moorhead, who keeps his desktop machines OC’ed to 3.2 GHz and arguing with IT Police… All in all, this effort brought a lot of fighting spirit to AMD and these guys are now biting at all sides. First with Radeon series, then with chipsets and now with CPUs.
Phenom II is going to be extremely overclockable. How overclockable? Much.
With good air-cooler, 4.0 GHz is a given on almost every Black Edition CPU that will hit the stores starting January 8, 2009. This is nothing special, since Intel can do the same with Core i7 series. But, with water-cooling or TEC-enhanced water-cooling (hint: CoolIT), you can easily reach 4.5 GHz and beyond.
But, the real show starts when we dip below the zero degrees Celsius/Centigrade. History of AMD and sub-zero cooling is quite interesting. AMD was the first manufacturer to showcase vapor chamber and liquid oxygen cooling (yes, oxygen, not nitrogen) with Athlon 550 MHz that reached 1.03 GHz and became the first CPU to pass the 1 GHz mark. As the time went by, AMD slowly started to move away from Swashbuckler attitude lead by Jerry Sanders and put a dull corporate Motorola face lead by Hector Jesus Ruiz. All of this is past now, since AMD put substantial effort to produce a CPU which operating temperature is massive 300 degrees Celsius!
Yes, you’ve read it correctly – from -200 to +100, you can be certain that your Phenom will not fail. On-die sensors are tweaked up and they will not lock the part at -100 or -20C, and you can use dry ice or LN2 to crank it up to the max.

The max reached so far by AMD team is… 6.0 GHz! Given that most LN2 clockers use dual-core CPUs to reach 5.5+ GHz speeds, seeing 6.0 GHz CPU running applications such as Crysis is a testament to monumental effort put by AMD’s CPU and Chipset team. Don’t think this was CPU team only effort – guys from Markham worked hard on Advanced Clock Calibration, or ACC. ACC is exactly “the secret sauce” AMD needed to unlock these levels of performance.
Hitting 4.0 GHz on air, 4.5 on water, 4.5+ on TEC+water, 5.6 GHz on dry ice and there was a post at 6.0 GHz. Given the fact that dry ice is “weaker” solution than LN2, it will be really interesting to see what will happen when hard-core overclockers get their hands on these 45nm ice-cold babies.
AMD is back. And yes, Intel’s Core i7 thunder has just been stolen completely. Core i7 is a great CPU, but quite expensive platform, with three channels of DDR3. AMD Phenom II comes out with 16 GB/s of memory bandwidth using only two channels, and clocking like there’s no tomorrow.
The best part of them all is the price: AMD Phenom II 940 Black Edition will set you back for 40% of the amount you have to shell out for Core i7 Extreme 965 and yet, it comes with a radically cheaper platform of equal or even better overclocking capabilities.
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http://theovalich.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/amd-hits-60-ghz-steals-intels-core-i7-thunder/

Was looking at a few reviews and I found this. Looks good.
 
yes high end air as it will prob be with the AMD's

The big question though is how will they compare to i7 clock for clock
 
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Sorry if I'm being so blind here but what makes this chip so special to people without the extraordanary cooling methods ?
 
Yeah the old AMD is back and fighting hard. Looking forward to these new cpu's so hope that there in my price range so that I can upgrade and OC that thing to 4ghz :D:D:D

foozball3000 said:
Should be fun to see what Tom's Hardware makes with this one...
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They will probably push it up to 8.3Ghz :drool:

@Ghost02 its going to be cheaper and be on par/better(could be worse don't know yet but so far so good) than Intels quad cores, but we will have to see what happens to the dual core CPU's I know that AMD already discontinued the amd Am2 6400+. We will have to see what Intel does.
 
Ghost02 said:
Doesn't the E8500 also reach 4ghz on air ?
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Even the E5200 can get to 4ghz on air...its only news coz the older am2 struggle to reach 3ghz.

Though if it is the same as the i7 clock for clock or even slightly slower amd steals a win...

Nice :D I know what my next upgrade will be
 
Now thats where I get confused, it's priced like one of the big guns but it doesn't seem much different to the E8500 or E8600.
 
Ghost02 said:
Doesn't the E8500 also reach 4ghz on air ?
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Yeah it does... and should be able to clock a little more with a decent air fan... around 4.3 if you consider the ratios it's running.
I've seen one of the earlier C2D's, a 2.6 or something, run at 4GHz with the stock fan.

The problem with AMD's processors is that their "6 GHz" doesn't perform the same as Intel's "6 GHz".
 
froot said:
Yeah it does... and should be able to clock a little more with a decent air fan... around 4.3 if you consider the ratios it's running.
I've seen one of the earlier C2D's, a 2.6 or something, run at 4GHz with the stock fan.

The problem with AMD's processors is that their "6 GHz" doesn't perform the same as Intel's "6 GHz".
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And in the article it says that the 6ghz is with the special cooling equipment the AMD team has. I think to the people who just use air to overclock the E8500 will do the same job
 
Had a pamphlet from our hardware supplier - the top of the range Nehalem goes for R13000 (almost)...

A tad too expensive for us mere mortals to purchase...
 
Ghost02 said:
And in the article it says that the 6ghz is with the special cooling equipment the AMD team has. I think to the people who just use air to overclock the E8500 will do the same job
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Probably, but this is good news for all.

If its better than i7, intel will be forced to drop prices.

If its not as good as intel, we got a cheaper alternative

At least AMD made an improvement and we'll get some competitve pricing going on.

I mean look at how expensive all these intel processors are...damn! (except of course the e5200 and e7200)
 
Well I hope AMD will be making a comeback, but I need to see some benches first comparing the two.
 
in the article, the little bit at the end says they got it to post at 6ghz.
i'm not sure how much fun a pc is that posts at 6ghz and does nothing else. seriously. a workable, reliable, 24/7 clock speed is more handy in real life. IIRC, skt 478 got up to 5ghz with ln2.

sorry for lack of enthusiasm, but there really isnt much to crow about after reading the article.
a new amd cpu, which is competitive will do wonders for intels pricing, so it is welcomed from my side, but to say they got a 6ghz cpu is to say my nissan 1400 got to 200mph, once I managed to get it off "god's window". it wasnt much use, but the radar gun says it did 200mph.
 
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