3 ms·
> The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time. About a week ago, completely out of the blue, YouTube recommended this old gem to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch
by st_goliath 7mo ago
> The Megahertz Wars were an exciting time.
About a week ago, completely out of the blue, YouTube recommended this old gem to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jQZxH7NgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jQZxH7NgM
A Pentium 4, overclocked to 5GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling.
Watching this was such an amazing throwback. I remember clearly the last time I saw it, which was when an excited friend showed it to me on a PC at our schools library. A year or so before YouTube even existed.
By 2005, my Pentium 4 Prescott at home had some 3.6GHz without overclocking, 4GHz models for the consumer market were already announced (but plagued by delays), but surely 10GHz was "just a few more years away".
- fnord77 7mo agoonly just last year did someone goose a PC cpu to 9.13ghz https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/core-i9-14900kf-overclocked-to-9-13-ghz-to-become-the-highest-clocked-cpu-of-all-time-13-mhz-faster-than-the-previous-record-holder https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/core-i9-1490...
- accrual 7mo agoIIRC, part of the GHz problem is that very long pipelines like that of the Pentium 4 tend to show increasing benefits at higher clocks. If you can keep the pipeline full then the system reaps the benefits. Sort of like a drag racer - goes very fast in a straight line but terrible on corners. But with longer pipelines comes larger penalties when the pipeline needs to be flushed, so the P4 eventually hit a wall and Intel returned to the late Pentium 3 Tualatin core, refining it into the Pentium M which later evolved into the first Core CPUs.