Asus has clocked Intel's Core i9 13900K (opens in new tab), breaking the 9GHz barrier for the first time. To be exact, the 13900K booted to the desktop at a trivial 9,008 MHz (opens in new tab), a new world record according to Asus and Intel. [To achieve this feat, the Asus overclocking team switched from liquid nitrogen to liquid helium. With nitrogen, Asus had previously achieved 8.8 GHz.

Of course, the advantage of helium is even lower temperatures: according to Asus, the temperature with liquid nitrogen was -196°C. Helium brought this down to minus 269°C.

Incidentally, this is only 4°C above absolute zero at minus 273.15°C. Cold. [9 GHz is a very impressive number, and we don't expect to see retail chips running at stock clocks anytime soon. Intel is planning to release a new 6GHz version of the 13900K (said to be the i9 13900KS), which is likely to be announced at CES in January. But a 9GHz chip" Don't get your hopes up.

Nevertheless, this overclocking stunt by Asus does make one think about the long-term role of clock speed in performance: as far back as 2000, Intel was predicting that the then-new Pentium 4 Netburst architecture would reach 10 GHz by 2005. by 2005 (open in new tab).

It never materialized. Almost not even. But as process node shrink becomes increasingly difficult and expensive, and adding transistors is no longer an effective means of increasing performance, clock speed as the primary means of increasing performance may make a comeback.

Of course, process shrinkage and frequency jumps are interrelated. Therefore, pursuing even higher clock speeds without die shrinkage will probably not work either. Thus, we can only hope that Moore's law continues and that Intel's recent bold prediction (open in new tab) to deliver 1 trillion transistor chips by 2030 is correct.