Sourcing a 6+ GHz PC? UK preferred.

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Quartz-1

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My brother's workplace licenses a super-expensive piece of software. It's single-threaded, cache-intensive, and does not parallelise. They have a lot of work to do. So they need a PC with a CPU that runs as fast as possible and will do so 24/7. The cost of a PC is trivial compared to the cost of the software so even if the CPU only lasts a year they're up. Their current rig uses water cooling and runs at 4.8 GHz, but they need more speed.

My brother has turned to me, and I'm turning to you.
 
You will only get that fast with Phase Change IF possible, and you will not be able to find one commercially, it will be a custom unit probably dual stage. It would be costly hardware wise but that you are already aware.

You are looking at around $10,000, with no guarantee for 6ghz exactly but you would be very close.

I have been out of the phase change loop for a while now but the technology is still exactly the same, you can contact me via PM if interested.
 
Boxx sells overclocked workstations you could check them out. That said I can't imagine any commercial outfit selling a 6ghz cpu. I have never seen a cpu run that high for anything but benchmarking even under phase change.
 
Quartz-1 said:
My brother's workplace licenses a super-expensive piece of software. It's single-threaded, cache-intensive, and does not parallelise. They have a lot of work to do. So they need a PC with a CPU that runs as fast as possible and will do so 24/7. The cost of a PC is trivial compared to the cost of the software so even if the CPU only lasts a year they're up. Their current rig uses water cooling and runs at 4.8 GHz, but they need more speed.

My brother has turned to me, and I'm turning to you.
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What is the model of the CPU running at 4.8ghz. Extreme example. A i7 running at 4.8ghz will wipe the floor with a P4 running at the same speed or anything AMD.(I say looking at the box with the 8120 sitting in the corner.)
 
You should warn them that running an overclocked CPU is not advisable for a business. The chance of data corruption is a lot higher.
 
Peteman100 said:
You should warn them that running an overclocked CPU is not advisable for a business. The chance of data corruption is a lot higher.
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I have already raised that issue, albeit from a different angle. But the software is so expensive and so in demand that speed is vital.
 
leeleatherwood said:
Why not purchase different software that is multi threaded?
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I'm told the software does not lend itself to threading. It is also memory intensive. Basically it's running a complex calculation on a huge dataset. They tried running multiple instances and performance decreased almost linearly. 2 processes took almost twice the time.

And having the results produced by this program is a customer requirement.
 
Would you be willing to tell us what system he's using now?

Does he need specific interfaces/ports? Does a certain OS need to be run?
 
bewolf cluster... if it runs under linux..

some how make the cluster look like one big arse cpu!
 
Get the exact specs for the current hardware that they are running and post it here.

If you are working on a huge dataset, depending on the data, it should be fairly trivial to break the data down with the program if the company that makes the software would be willing to spend the time to make it multithreaded.
 
I have to imagine there's a better way to improve their situation than trying to buy a 6GHz cascade cooled chip (which as mentioned will probably corrupt their results, possibly silently and undetected).
 
450 said:
Would you be willing to tell us what system he's using now?
Click to expand...

It's a white-box overclocked i7-3970X running at 4.8 GHz on an ASUS motherboard. 32 GB RAM, SSD.

cyclone3d said:
If you are working on a huge dataset, depending on the data, it should be fairly trivial to break the data down
Click to expand...

Apparently it isn't trivial and they haven't done it.
 
Quartz-1 said:
It's a white-box overclocked i7-3970X running at 4.8 GHz on an ASUS motherboard. 32 GB RAM, SSD.



Apparently it isn't trivial and they haven't done it.
Click to expand...

Unless the data all has to be worked on in a serial fashion, then it should be fairly easy to break it down into smaller bits. A lot of programs that could be pretty easily multithreaded are not because the programmers working on the program are not proficient at multithreading.

edit: if it could be broken down into smaller bits that would fit in the processor's cache, it would speed up the calculation quite a bit. If not, you are going to have a ton of cache thrashing which will hurt the performance a lot. /edit

What speed and timings is the RAM running at? Since it is RAM intensive, the faster clocked the RAM is, the better performance you will get.

Since it is single threaded, you might be able to try disabling some of the cores in the BIOS and possible try disabling hyperthreading as well in order to be able to overclock a bit more. I would leave at least 2 cores enabled so the OS has something to work with while the program is running.
 
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