One of the biggest challenges for CPU designers is to achieve the highest possible speed within specific limits. The most important? The heat emitted and energy consumption. However, there are ways in which this limitation can be circumvented and the processor can achieve speeds much higher than normal. This is called extreme overclocking and thanks to this they have managed to bring an Intel Core i9-13900K to 8.2 GHz clock speed . We tell you the details.
A processor is the most complex piece of electronics that exists today, not only because of the billions of transistors that are in such a small space, but also because of the way in which they are organized. Normally, manufacturers tell us about their organization in a general way, but it is an emerging system where if we go from the complex to the specific we will realize that we have unknown structures. What does this have to do with overclocking? A lot and we have just been confirmed with extreme overclocking that the architecture of the Intel Core 13 is not four changes over its predecessor.
How did the Intel Core i9-13900K reach 8.2 GHz?
Well, this question has two answers, the first one is the simplest and most apparent, so we are going to focus on it as the main explanation. In the middle of the Intel Creator Challange , famed overclocking expert Allen Golibersuch gave a live demo, using advanced techniques, to show how far he can crank up the frequency or clock speed of his next Top CPU, if we rule out the dual version of it, the i9-13900KS.
The technique used is the classic use of liquid nitrogen to cool the processor, which due to its chemical properties can cool this CPU down to -193 °C in temperature and have room to get the highest clock speed in the history of a domestic CPU, 8.2 GHz, although yes, the increase in frequency has been focused on a single core . Which has been configured with a base clock speed of 100 MHZ and a multiplier of x82 .
This figure exceeds the record reached by the Ryzen 9 7950X that using the same techniques that reach 7.5 GHz speed. Of course, the AMD processor is designed to work with slightly lower consumption and temperatures, which is a disadvantage in these extreme overclocking exercises. At the same time, this also beats the 7.49 GHz record held by the i9-12900KS under liquid nitrogen.
Higher speed by architecture
With the Intel Core 13 it has become clear to us that its designers have taken a different path than AMD, and that is that instead of improving performance per clock cycle they have chosen to make them faster. This often requires increasing the number of stages that the instructions have to go through until they are resolved, which translates into having to spend a greater number of transistors or reorganize existing resources.
The fact that the Intel Core i9-13900K clocks in at 8.2 GHz may seem like a trivial exercise to us, but it shows us that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, this time on a processor. Apart from teaching us, the biggest muscle in resources that the blue brand has, capable of launching a new architecture on an annual basis at this point. Meanwhile, we await the launch, presumably for the 20th of this month , to test its performance.