AMD A10-6800K APU Overclocked to Over 8.0 GHz
An overclocker has managed to overclock the AMD A10-6800K to ever-so-slightly past the 8.0 GHz mark.
A Finnish overclocker going by the name "The Stilt" has managed to overclock AMD's flagship APU part, the A10-6800K, to just past 8.0 GHz. The chip was cooled using liquid nitrogen and pumped full of juice on a voltage of 1.992 V. This combination yielded a temperature of a somewhat chilly -185°C.
The CPU's base clock was set at 126.99 MHz and the multiplier at 63.0x, rendering a CPU clock speed of 8000.48 MHz. The most impressive part of this overclock, though, isn't the sheer clock speed alone (contrary to what you might believe), but rather that this clock speed was attained on all four cores of the APU simultaneously. That's right; no part of the APU was disabled during this overclock. Normally, to achieve such speeds, all but one of the cores must be disabled.
The motherboard used was an Asus F2A85-V PRO in combination with 4 GB of G.Skill DDR3 memory. The memory was left running at an effective speed of 1693.2 MHz.
See the CPU-Z validation here.

I would like to see this benched
Doubt it could be benched beyond 5-6ghz
More transistors and shrinking architecture inherently creates massive amounts of heat. Maybe water cooling will be the standard cooler boxed with CPUs some day soon!
More transistors and shrinking architecture inherently creates massive amounts of heat. Maybe water cooling will be the standard cooler boxed with CPUs some day soon! "
Wrong. Smaller transistors mean they use less power, which inherently creates less heat. Today's CPUs are hitting 5Ghz on air cooling, where if we tried to push a 300 mhz CPU much past its design it would catch fire. The APU in this test was set at 2 volts, but five years ago the CPUs were all above 3.3 volts.
Not really.
Yes, smaller transistors use less power (~40% less per shrink) but you have 2-3X as many of them within a given surface area so power per square millimeter when unconstrained by power and heat budgets is still increasing by 20-50% per shrink and that makes smaller processes increasingly difficult to cool down.
Given that Nitrogen boils at −195.79 °C, −320.33 °F, it wouldn't really last in your freezer for too long.
Agree, Intel needs to shrink both the transistor as well as reducing the transistor count, in order to lower the power. But I think they should also do away with the TIM and IHS. The TIM that Intel is using for the IHS is making it difficult to cool the processor. They should have just do away with the IHS and just let the die surface exposed. Or maybe add copper over metal to cover the bare die surface, that should make the cooling much more effective with aftermarket coolers.
The TIM is not the real problem from what I have read.
Someone who de-lidded his Haswell measured the substrate-to-top-of-die and substrate-to-IHS-top heights, subtracted the IHS thickness from the difference and concluded that there is a ~60 micron gap between the IHS and CPU die - the IHS is not making physical contact with the die at all. By replacing the TIM with known high-quality stuff and replicating the gap using paper shims to achieve the same substrate-to-IHS thickness, he found out that Intel's TIM appears to be just as good as enthusiast stuff since the enthusiast stuff actually performed a few degrees worse than Intel's TIM. Removing the gap (shims) is what produced a 20-30C drop in OC temperatures.
Based on that, it seems Intel's TIM would be perfectly fine were it not for the surprisingly large gap between IHS and die.
Benefits of smaller transistors and wires:
- lower gate capacitance and trace resistance/inductance = faster switching and lower power
- less die area to pack a given amount of features = more dies per wafer = cheaper production
- faster switching and shorter wires = faster propagation = ability to cram more logic between D-flops = more work per clock and lower power
- larger transistor budget = more features moved on-chip = cheaper system cost
This is no by means an exhaustive list. Those are merely the more obvious things I can think of.