AMD CPU overclocker Bill Alverson, who goes by the handle Sampson, set several CPU performance records on Wednesday with his overclocked Threadripper Pro 7995WX. The 96-core processor is based on AMD's Genoa family, which also powers the regular Threadripper 7000 lineup and 4th Generation EPYC CPUs. These records were set with air cooling, rather than liquid nitrogen, liquid helium, or even just plain-old water cooling. In fact, the 7995WX may have much more headroom with more complex cooling.
The benchmark world records are in Cinebench R23, Cinebench R20, and Cinebench R15, and Alverson was able to take the three crowns by overclocking his 7995WX to 4.8GHz on all 96 cores. That caused his CPU to consume nearly 1,000 watts under peak load, and he used IceGiant's ProSiphon Elite to cool it. It still hit over 100 C however, and an even better cooling solution using water-cooling or liquid nitrogen/helium would probably get even more juice out of the top-end Threadripper Pro chip.
Earlier this year, the record for the three Cinebench benchmarks had been held by the Xeon w9 3495X based on Sapphire Rapids, and then by a system with two EPYC 9654 CPUs. However, all records set with the 3495X were done with liquid nitrogen, while the dual EPYC 9654 server had a total of 192 cores, or 96 cores per CPU, as well as custom water cooling. The new world record set by the 7995WX is so remarkable because it had neither exotic cooling nor a ton of cores. Though, the dual-EPYC system probably lost because Cinebench R23 likely can't fully utilize nearly 200 cores.
The IceGiant ProSiphon Elite cooler used on the 7995WX.
This is likely just the first of at least a few world records that will be set by 96-core Threadripper chips. If air cooling can get the 7995WX to 4.8GHz, then there's little question that better cooling methods will be able to push the chip even further. The latest world records will probably be a topic of discussion on tomorrow's Two And A Half Geeks livestream, where we'll be joined by AMD's David McAfee, who oversees the company's consumer CPUs as General Manager of the Client Channel Business.
