IDF: 5.56GHz Penryn breaks three benchmark records in two minutes

Posted at: 7:18am 19th September 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

Using a three-phase cascade cooler, Intel's new CPU breaks world records in AquaMark and CineBench

It wasn't so long ago that Intel was doing everything it could to stop overclockers from piling on the heatsinks to squeeze more speed out of their chips, but the company is now seemingly embracing overclockers with open arms. Not only is Intel now producing chipsets such as X38 for enthusiasts, bit it's also just demonstrated a massively overclocked machine based on Intel's a new 45nm Penryn CPU.

Intel hired Charles Worth from Xtreme Systems to overclock the chip 'to the limits,' and he proudly demonstrated his efforts during Intel CEO Paul Otellini's keynote speech at IDF. Worth used an impressive three-phase cascade system (meaning it uses three refrigeration compressors chained together) to cool the CPU, and managed to clock it all the way up to 5.56Hz, while cooling the CPU to -160°C.

Worth then proceeded to show off the fruit of his labours by claiming he could break three world benchmark records in just two minutes. This included SuperPi 1M, where he beat Team Japan's previous record, and he then went on to run AquaMark where his score of 273,000 trashed the previous record of 267,000. Finally, he then ran the 32-bit version of CineBench 10, where a score just shy of 20,000 (he didn't reveal the actual score, unfortunately) again clinched a world record for a quad-core CPU.

Worth exclaimed that 'this is the fastest processor we've ever seen.' A part of the reason for the chip's clockability was the lack of leakage from the gates, which allowed more voltage to be applied. 'Like Paul said earlier,' said Worth, 'the more voltage we push into this core, the faster we can push this processor. I have not reached the top speed of this processor yet, and I did reach 5.56GHz already on an unmodded board. This board has no voltage modifications of any kind.' Both the motherboard and GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics card had apparently not been volt-modded in any way.

Unfortunately, Worth had overshot by ten seconds before completing the CineBench test, but it's still an impressive achievement for both Intel and the extreme overclocking community.