World Record for Intel’s Fastest Single-Socket Processor
Elmor, a professional overclocker, recently achieved a world record using Intel’s fastest single-socket processor, the Xeon W9-3495X, running on Maxon’s popular 3D renderer, Cinebench R23. The processor was cooled down to -92.8 degrees Celsius (-135 degrees Fahrenheit) and boosted to 5.5GHz across all 56 cores using liquid nitrogen. This is a significant increase from its base frequency of 1.7GHz and a max turbo frequency of 4.8GHz. At its peak, the entire workstation drew almost 1.9kW and required a pair of 1.6kW PSUs to feed it.
The world record was achieved with more than 132,000 points. However, raw clock speeds tend to be an expensive way to reach a certain performance level, which explains why even Intel is now resorting to so-called Performance and Efficient cores in its mainstream processors.
Extreme Cooling is Here to Stay
While cooling with liquid nitrogen may not become mainstream amongst consumers, there is a huge market for cooling systems and coolants in the data center where hyperscalers spend millions of dollars to move extra heat outside of servers and other infrastructure. Beyond the usual water cooling solutions popular with gamers and traditional overclockers, companies like Microsoft, Intel, and Google are betting big on something called liquid immersion cooling where the server hardware is literally submerged in tanks of non-conductive fluid.
Smartphone vendors have also found innovative ways to dissipate heat in an economical and efficient way. Solutions like vapor cooling systems cannot unfortunately be scaled out for systems that require more heat to be evacuated.
Source: Tomshardware and HardwareLuxx
