Originally, I wanted to save this for a later post, but after receiving a half a dozen emails about it from different folks, I had to move fast before somebody else broke the story!
The Intel Gulftown is truly remarkable out of the box, without any overclocking. All six cores banging out 3.33 GHz on that Westmere micro-architecture, able to run up to 12 threads in parallel, is really something beautiful to behold. Benchmarkers soon discovered that the 32 nanometer CMOS semiconductor, in conjunction with all of the other improvements, meant that GHz per GHz, the Gulftown was 50% faster than a quad core Bloomfield (the i7-975).
Whoah! So a 3.33 GHz Gulftown was like a 4.995 GHz (oh, hell, call it a 5.0 GHz system, would ya?) i7-975?
Yes, we were salivating over that news.
But gains in the computer industry have been creeping along. We first broke 3.0 GHz back in 2002. Now, architectures have made considerable gains since then, and more cores have been added as the years have gone on, but for the most part, the clock frequency has hit a thermodynamic brick wall of sorts.
Here it is 8 years later, and we are still all "ooooooh, aaaaaaah" over a 3.33 GHz processor called the Intel Gulftown.
So, as many of us daydream, we type different "dream speeds" (more correctly, frequencies) into the Google search engine. And what does Google do for us? Google finds references to them, but.... how?
I tried my hand at "5.0 GHz Gulftown" and lo and behold, there were SEVERAL places already raving about a company called Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking.
OK, I had to blink. I know what overclocking is, and how Liquid Nitrogen is used to build some benchtop "rigs" that look like they'd never fit into a case of any dimension. Did someone hookup a Liquid Nitrogen cooling solution to an Intel Gulftown to produce the 5.0 GHz system everyone was talking about?
It turns out: No! But they did build a 5.0 GHz Intel Gulftown with just a "normal" cooling solution that just about everybody could use! That is what all the buzz was about!
Time to visit http://www.LiquidNitrogenOverclocking.com and see what was going on. After a dozen phone calls, I finally reach someone named Ed Trice. It turns out that Ed is calling the shots over at L.N.O., and he and Chief Technical Officer William Harmon, known the world over as "Buckeye" in the overclocking domain, have figured out what nobody else in the world has: How to fit a cooling solution to overclock a 5.0 GHz Gulftown into one box.
My interview with Ed Trice was very enjoyable. We talked about almost everything, and I do mean everything. No matter how the conversation veered, he always came back to Buckeye's "Trinity Lightning" model, what Bill named their creation. The 5.0 GHz Trinity Lightning evolved out of a few "simple questions" Ed asked Bill. Bill would tell Ed why it was not possible, nor feasible, to do "X-Y-Z", the thing that Ed postulated about as a means to make computers faster. Ed would grow silent, and then throw another brainstorming idea at Bill.
"Most of the time, Bill was amused at my relatively absurd ideas," Ed would say "But with each new suggestion, he would chuckle less, and say something like '...ummm...' more and more. Eventually we had something that was worth exploring."
Ed fully credits Bill when it comes to the Trinity Lightning. "All I did was brainstorm and toss out crazy ideas, Bill really took it the rest of the way and delivered the goods. This is his design, and he should get all of the credit for it."
No matter how it came about, it really is a modern marvel. The machine gurgles a bit as it first starts up, then it churns and you can hear something is going on inside. Nothing on the monitor yet. And then, it starts to life.
"The core temperature must reach -40 or else it won't power on the computer," Ed Trice says, then he smiles when I ask him "Is that Fahrenheit or Celsius?"
He nods and says "Yes!" and breaks into a laugh. He explains: "That is the only temperature where degrees Fahrenheit equals degrees Celsius," and indeed, he is correct.
On with the demonstration. I had to see this thing crank first hand. First, a gander at CPU-z confirms this unit is running at 5002 MHz = just over 5.0 GHz. Wow. I beam from ear to ear with a huge smile on my face.
I am then shown benchmark run after benchmark run, SuperPi, Prime95, some whetstones, even one of Ed's checkers programs running so fast you can't read what is on the console window.
Much of what happens I can't report on, because I am so awestruck at what I am seeing, my pen refused to take notes. Here it was, right in front of me, a 5.0 GHz Intel Gulftown, crushing computation after computation, not dropping to below a frigid -30 Fahrenheit the whole time.
For those who are interested, click this link to visit their website and check it out for yourself. I heartily recommend the 5.0 GHz Trinity Lightning to all of those who need incredibly fast computing speed, and proven stability!
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