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Comment by atom_enger | Hacker News Reader

Does this remind anybody of Intel Pentium 4 Prescott?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4#Prescott

  Intel claimed that NetBurst would allow clock speeds of up to 10 GHz in future chips; however, severe problems with heat dissipation (especially with the Prescott Pentium 4) limited CPU clock speeds to a much lower 3.8 GHz

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I was thinking about this the other day when I first started reading the Coffee Lake reviews. This thing runs toasty. Yeah it's fast, but it's hot enough to boil water faster than a US kettle.

I hope the next step on Zen really closes the gap. It's only then we're going to be set for some real innovation from intel.

Someone overclocked an i9 to 6 GHz and it consumed a cool 1 kW:

https://youtu.be/_alRb9dMQjQ?t=14m48s

In what way?

Presumably in relation to power draw? The 8700K seems kind of like one of those "Overclocked straight from the factory" deals that you see a lot with Video cards.

Intel's historical response has been run it hotter when AMD introduces something that's competitive.

The issue with heat.

Yeah I wonder how hot it gets when doing matrix multiplications with numpy. My i6700K starts throttling within a few seconds, with air cooling rated for 130w.

Though for gaming it is most likely a dream.

Heat dissipation has been problematic for Intel not just with the recent 2066 disaster but way before that. Most Haswell desktop processors are not that easy to keep from throttling. This is exaggerated by large temperature gradients of 15 °C and more across the cores, and obviously the hottest core is limiting overall performance.

The fact that you can significantly improve the thermals by delidding the processor and replacing the TIM is really an embarrassment for Intel, especially on >$200 chips.

I'm curious, does this mean that upgrading the cooling is an alternative to overclocking (better heat dissipation -> longer performance bursts) or is the effect negligible in practice?

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