http://www.nordichardware.com/news,9189.html

An AMD Phenom II X4 955, a quad-core with a 3.2GHz stock speed, has set a new record for current-generation CPU overclocking at 7.1GHz using liquid nitrogen. The current record for Intel's Core i7 is only 5.6GHz, that being with an unreleased engineering sample.

lol holy shit XD high clock.

Yeah, the retail parts aren't limited by the architecture any more, just the heat output.

Oh, it's just liquid nitrogen cooling.

For a moment I thought this was something new and exciting instead of say... boring and old.

That's a lot of NOPs per second.

man that is fast! I cant wait, Imagine a 1 sec restart or a blink of an eye boot up! whew

ok, so with this liquid nitrogen cooling, do we still expect the chip to last 5 years or more?

If not, I don't give a rip. Heck, even if it did, I still don't care too much until cooling becomes reasonable for home users.

^ Whats a NOP? Normal operation?

Of course not. This is just stupid levels of OC. Current high-end AMD and Intel chips can run reasonably at about 3.8GHz with the stock cooler for normal operation. Beyond that is not guaranteed.

All the 7.1GHz figure indicates is that, with continual process refinements, desktop chips still have considerable headroom. It's not unreasonable to expect a 3.5GHz Phenom II by the end of the year. All that means is that AMD won't go bankrupt.

Practically nothing (ceratinly not bootup) is CPU-bound these days. You probably won't notice any difference unless you do professional image editing or something. Boot up times are generally limited by I/O (so getting an SSD over an HDD will cut 10s off boot time) and OS type (so a lightweight Linux distro will boot much faster than Windows; I believe Moblin has got to to a 2s boot).