Core I9 14900KF Breaks World Record, Almost Achieves 9.1GHz (2023) (2024)

Much better than the time just a few years ago where they tried to show a 28 core 5ghz chip and pretend it was a normal one and got pissed when enthousiast realized they were using insane cooling to get it there.

I'm still baffled by that showing years later. Over-engineered, over-cooled chips to reach absurd speed record has been a staple since as far as I remember, like back in the Pentium 2 or before. Why did anyone at Intel think they should hide the sauce, or get pissed when fans got to it, is beyond my comprehension.

> enthousiast realized they were using insane cooling to get it there.

Didn't they use a chiller?

They used a 1700 watt chiller with sub ambient cooling, and a power unit who could pump up to 2000 watts into the CPU. So clearly "record for the show", not "here is what you will buy tomorrow".

Which, taken as the usual world record and cool feat of cpu speed would have been perfectly fine and impressive, but they were getting scared of AMD so for some weird reason some idiot in their PR team insisted on pretending from top to bottom that this was a normal chip running on normal condition, and when Asus (I think ?) let fans see how it was achieved Intel gave them less than 30 minutes to give the chip back.

This was not a great era for Intel ...

Not at all really.

The 9Ghz clock was achieved not through any normal cooling or by efficiency of the chip.

These overclocking records have been around for decades but they're in no way shape or form representative of the average of even the top 1% of users.

It's impressive purely because it was possible with an off the shelf chip.

Intel is getting attacked from all sides.

AMD has raised their market share over the last 4-5 years from about 8% to 31% of x86 sales. Intel also saw 5 straight years of market share declines against AMD in the server space - which is by far the most lucrative.

And yes, they're also worried about ARM and Nvidia.

More than half of Intel's revenue come from desktop and laptop chips, and that's the segment that's being eaten the fastest, and the one doing the eating is AMD.

ARM is another threat on the horizon on that front, but it's nothing compared to the beating AMD has been giving them since the Ryzen showed up.

It's true. It's hard to see how Intel can catch up to Apple and AMD in the client and server space respectively.

However, I still own a substantial amount of Intel stocks because it will be one of the most valuable company in the world if China uses military action against Taiwan. If not, then I still believe Intel will be successful with their IFS strategy because the world is about to enter an era where compute will never be enough and designers want a second supplier next to TSMC.

AMD's secret sauce is a smart cache using like a 1 or 2 layer NN or something. We see NVIDIA's major insight long ago, to but generic compute cores on their chip (so as to no longer need to predict how many shader units, how many geometry units, etc, just have a pool of generic units)

So it follows that intel is doing something similar i.e. NN type units which may be used for ML, where the cache is not so important, or in your typical non-ML settings such as gaming or web browsing, these NN units will reduce cache misses at an incredible rate and thus (effectively) up memory i/o rates by 400-500%

I doubt they leap frog TSMC. 18A will come out around the same time as N2. I have more confidence that TSMc’s N2 will perform better and be in far higher volume and yield rate.

20A is sort of Intel’s first foray. 18A is really their serious node.

If you think Intel has a chance to leap TSMC, it will come at the 14A node but you have to bet that TSMC is wrong to stay with low NA.

That is a very simplistic look at it. We don’t know if TSMC has already done a lot of testing and thinks it can do it.

Meanwhile, Intel absolutely needed to try to take much bigger risks.

A pretty good article showing that low NA might be more cost effective: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/asml-dilemma-high-na-euv-is-w...

Lastly, the biggest chip you can make with low NA is 858 mm² which is nearly 2x bigger than high NA at 429 mm². This means it's impossible to make a chip as large as the Nvidia H100 GPU using high NA. If Nvidia uses Intel's 14A process, they will have to split the chip into multiple pieces and go chiplets approach. They're already doing it with Blackwell but that's stitching 2x 800mm²+ dies together. If they make a future chip using high NA nodes, they'd have to stitch 4x dies together to have the equivalent size which is considerably harder for GPUs.

I do believe that all highend chip makers will be switching to the chiplet approach. Everyone has to due to the high NA reticle limit. But TSMC's approach allows designers to keep making chips twice the size until around 2030. That's a huge advantage.

October 2023... and that typo..

 The team was able to achieve a very impressive 9043.92GHz

if you want to properly make light of it, you have to say 480000Ghz

(a literal joke, since visible light is 480 thz)

> I can't pronounce the name of more than 80% of their writers now.

What does this mean? Only those with Anglo-Saxon heritage make for good writers?

Anglo-saxon names would make it more likely that English is their first language (and therefore more likely to be fluent), which is the language used in these articles.

A bit of a stretch though.

I'm not sure that's true.

Firstly because countries like the US are home to many native English speaking people with non-Saxon names, and countries like Ireland in the old world speak English while retaining their native names.

Secondly because many people who learn English as a second language grow up be fluent and can write with ease. I look to places like the Netherlands where students from all over the world are writing theses for their higher education completely in English.

It's not that hard to write in your second language, certainly not to the point that your name could be in any way an indicator of your skill level.

> What does this mean?

Aliens.

The writer in question seems to be a freelancer who started working with them in August 2023, meaning he was pretty new to Tomshardware when he published this in October.

Looks like the usual cost cutting where you replace employees with contractors.

Also, this entire article is based on an Asus advertisem*nt video on YouTube. I'm sure they wouldn't put their best writers on that kind of content.

My air (noctua) cooled 7900X sustains 12 cores at 5200MHz reliably, but it's honestly hard to find that much saturation, most tasks can run better with 8 cores sustaining about 5400, or 4 cores sustaining about 5500.

With better cooling I'd be surprised if I couldn't sustain 5400 on all 12 cores.

The first paragraph says:

 The overclocking team from Asus has achieved a new CPU frequency world record with Intel's brand-new Raptor Lake Refresh Core i9-14900KF. The team was able to achieve a very impressive 9043.92GHz on a single P-core with liquid helium, breaking the previous world record by 35.1MHz.

Perhaps the editor thought that "almost 9.1GHz" sounds better than "over 9GHz". I disagree with both - the best would be "over 9000 MHz" [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiMHTK15Pik

> Core I9 14900KF Breaks World Record, Achieves 9043.92GHz

Boom, honest, direct reporting.

It’s really not hard to do, it takes more energy to think up the clickbait than to just tell the facts.

One would think from far away perspective or first principles, that we have passed the point of liquid cooling being way more optimal in the datacenter a long time ago already (if you're actually doing computing and not idling).

But everything's so slow and path dependent.

I wonder how much you could do with a single rack if you got really serious about it. Cooling, power, networking etc.

Obligatory soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u35crz9xZG4

Obligatory "it's over 9000!"

https://youtu.be/SiMHTK15Pik?si=0wlPOl7QGVf1zTe8

In-process soundtrack: https://youtu.be/hyNu5i_6lKA?si=fVzH88KRo55L-uG_

Sorry, why do you say that the P4/Netburst microarchitecture doesn't compare badly to modern chips? Their performance was utter garbage (at the time, and now) which is why the Pentium M architecture (a Pentium III derivative) was used when they built out Core. AMD was spanking them at the time with the K8/Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64 X2.

A super long pipeline allows higher clock rates but it takes a giant dirt nap when branch prediction fails and when you have a cache miss. You end up having massive latencies in these cases.

Further, generally all else being equal a lower clock rate allows you to be more energy efficient.

Just in terms of power consumption they don’t compare badly. Performance, of course, no comparison, haha.

Agree that it had tons of problems. But branch prediction has gotten better, compilers have gotten better, etc. Maybe they could be handled now!

Exactly! We barely interact with our dishwashers, refrigerators, and water heaters. We just fill them up and empty them out occasionally. Boring! But we’re willing to devote hundreds or thousands of watts to them and dozens of square feet of floor space to them. Computers are much more interesting, therefore they deserve that same appliance treatment.

I’m kidding in these sense that I don’t think a single core could be designed to usefully use 1000W. I get why things happened as they did. But I do still think single threaded performance is much more interesting than multi-core, so I wish we could see how those designs would have evolved.

But at least drag racing is a spectacle. Not my thing, but it is a spectacle.

This? You push a button and a number comes up.

Are you sure you haven't visited hacker news by mistake?

Hardware overclocking requires a decent amount of knowledge, most of it obtainable only through months of trial and error, and a lot of tuning to push dozens of often conflicting parameters just right. Extreme overclocking requires that much more. If what they're doing is simply "pushing a button", then programming and system administration can be reduced to that too, along with many other things.

You simply can't get full performance from modern systems without some amount of overclocking, and things like PBO and XMP/EXPO profiles are far from what your hardware can achieve because they have to be very conservative, or many systems won't run without additional manual tuning, which most consumers won't do.

(Except for closed systems like Apple's where your hardware doesn't belong to you and you can't change anything anyway.)

So one immediate thing overclockers provide are general guidance on what you can expect to achieve and what thing to tune which way to get close to maximum performance from your hardware without spending months on it like they did. I heavily rely on such information. My system would be at least 25% slower if not for these "button pushers".

Benchmarking hardware has been a thing forever, and applies to a vast swathe of things.Graphics cards, ram, hard drives, network cards etc.

Then you look further and see that it’s done with coffee machines, motors (of all sorts), and just about any other device you can find, make or name.

Wanting a fast/strong/powerful/quick X is a fairly common thing for many of us.

The bigger issue is that helium is a functionally finite resource, and does not remain in the atmosphere (at least IIRC it literally just floats up until it gets blown into space).

The bigger local issue you run into with liquid helium and liquid nitrogen is having it evaporate in an enclosed space. You can "easily" create an environment leading to inert gas suffocation (a real hazard in some industrial cases) - in reality any simple case like this is unlikely to be using enough of N or He, and is unlikely to be sufficiently enclosed, but in principle it would be possible - maybe if you were in a basem*nt and spilled an inexplicably large thermos of them it could do it.

You can definitely cause problems by spilling an entire dewer into a smaller room.

Had to calculate this for the safety part of a LAN party event application. Fortunately we had a very big room.