Today’s Intel Developer Forum fastest processor in the world gold star goes to Int—I mean, AMD?
That’s right, AMD, Intel’s least-favorite chip-making rival, who apparently managed to jam prototype processing tech, incantations from a book of magic, a sacrificial dove and a bag of gilded runestones into a box to coax an AMD FX desktop processor from zero to 8.429GHz in no time flat.
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Now read what I just wrote without the made-up magic bits and you’ve got AMD’s perfectly real Bulldozer-core FX processor tech, code named “Zambezi,” that roared past the prior record holder by over 100MHz in AMD’s Guinness World Record-breaking overclock (announced at IDF to boot).
According to HotHardware, AMD’s goals during the test were twofold: to show the Bulldozer chip architecture has serious frequency headroom, and to test for “cold bugs”—issues that manifest at extremely low temperatures.
And the temps got plenty low here.
The score was achieved with basic BIOS settings and without benchmarks, since the goal was strictly to achieve the highest CPU-Z score. CPU-Z is a free and widely used Windows-based clocking utility for measuring a CPU’s frequency or “clock speed.” The clock speed was adjusted upward on-the-fly, and the CPU itself was initially cooled with liquid nitrogen.
Until they switched to liquid helium (that’s right, liquid helium) at which point the temps drop to below 220 degrees Celsius (minus 428F).
As the team crossed the 8.309GHz record threshold, they pointed out “and we had the virus scanner enabled…let’s see if we can go higher.”
And higher they do, until…well, you’ll want to watch for yourself, up top, to see (or rather hear) what happens when you push a CPU like this to its absolute limits.
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Matt Peckham is a reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @mattpeckham or on Facebook. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.