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Comment by cjslep | Hacker News Reader

"Not being overclocked" at 5GHz means the system is designed to run at that speed off the shelf without becoming molten slag and without aftermarket industrial grade cooling systems.

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So it's not the fact that it was overclocked that matters, but the fact that it required aftermarket cooling, right? Like my current CPU cannot get within 100MHz of its supposed max TurboBoost frequency due to (I presume) cooling limits, despite the fact that I haven't overclocked it, so for me to even get the frequency it is marketed as I would need aftermarket cooling... which seems like the same problem despite the lack of overclocking, right?

Many times the announced max frequency is for single-core usage. If you're using all the cores they all have to slow down collectively so the whole CPU doesn't overheat.

Everything I'm talking about is single-threaded use only.

Overclocking sometimes invalides warantee.

Overclocking almost always shortens life expectancy of the CPU.

Ahh, so the difference is the voiding of the warranty? If so then this seems to explain why it would be more than a naming issue.

It's in the category of "It may or may not work, YMMV, don't call us if you mess up".

He didn't mean it like that (or at least I think he didn't). Imagine it like person walking/running - When you are expect to walk at some pace (5GHz) you can do it proficiently for long time, considering you get your regular inputs and outputs taken care of (basic cooling, regular power drain), when you overclock - run, you need much more care to be able to run for a long time (stronger cooling, more power headroom, overclocking motherboard).

What Intel in this demo did is strapped you behind the car and drove a 100 meters dash proclaiming - look he survived, he 'ran' that 100 meters run like a champ, it's possible to run this fast.

Well, the aftermarket cooling in the presentation was a 1HP sub-ambient cooling solution (though one image shows the system with a rating of 1.7kW)

The entire system pulled over 2kW of power, a lot of that dedicated to cooling.

This isn't merely "you need aftermarket cooling" but rather "you need to dedicated serious resources to cooling this".

2kW is right about the wattage of a small electric fan heater for comparison. So regardless of how they made it look, anyone standing near it should have felt warmer.

People are overclocking using liquid Nitrogen for getting records but that is not something you can use practically, the backlash against what Intel did is that this overclock was hard to pull for regular use, it used so much power for cooling that some people on reddit suggested that you can't pull it from a regular power wall socket in some countries, also the demo was run for a few seconds that implies that if you would run it for a few minutes you may lose the ability to cool it enough and you will get less frequency.

A really cool feature the new AMD CPUs have is that they have a very well implemented turbo, if you give it good cooling it will know how to exploit it and give you more power.

As a side note, is a weird feeling running a 4 core/4 threads CPU when now workstation CPUs could reach up to 64 threads

It is the fact that it was overclocked because not every part can be overclocked the same.

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