Particulars have emerged concerning the latest world report achieved by Elmor, knowledgeable overclocker, utilizing Intel’s quickest single-socket processor, the Xeon W9-3495X, operating on Maxon’s standard 3D renderer, Cinebench R23, a staple throughout many workstation PCs. 

It was cooled right down to -92.eight levels Celsius (-135 levels Fahrenheit) and boosted to five.5GHz – throughout all 56 cores – utilizing liquid nitrogen; a major improve as its base frequency is 1.7GHz (with the CPU consuming 350W) and a max turbo frequency of 4.8GHz (consuming 420W doing so).

At its peak, your complete workstation drew nearly 1.9kW (which is about what a tumble dryer or a hairdryer pulls in) and required a pair of 1.6kW PSUs to feed it; we neither know the way a lot energy the CPU drew by itself nor what the elements have been (which might have allowed us to make an inexpensive calculation).

It did hit greater than 132,000 factors, which was the world report. That train, although, as I highlighted in a separate article, is nice for the headlines nevertheless it doesn’t say a lot about actual life efficiency particularly because it doesn’t present a transparent indication of what the efficiency of future CPU households will likely be.

Uncooked clock speeds are typically an costly method – when it comes to assets – to achieve a sure efficiency degree which explains why even Intel is now resorting to so-called Efficiency and Environment friendly cores in its mainstream processors, one thing that Arm launched 12 years in the past with the large.LITTLE paradigm. 

Excessive cooling is right here to remain

As for cooling with liquid nitrogen, whereas there’s no method this may turn out to be mainstream amongst shoppers, there’s an enormous marketplace for cooling methods and coolants within the information middle the place hyperscalers spend hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to maneuver additional warmth outdoors of servers and different infrastructure.

Past the same old water cooling options standard with players and conventional overclockers, corporations like Microsoft, Intel and Google are betting massive on one thing known as liquid immersion cooling the place the server {hardware} is actually submerged in tanks of non-conductive fluid, in an identical option to how an oil heater works.

Smartphone distributors have additionally discovered revolutionary methods to dissipate warmth in a cheap and environment friendly method (keep in mind that they will’t afford followers). Options like vapor cooling methods can’t sadly be scaled out for methods that require extra warmth to be evacuated.

By way of Tomshardware and HardwareLuxx