Welcome once again to Throwback Thursday, a time where each week we take a nostalgic look back at a point in time that resonated with the OC community. This week we take trip down memory lane to a point in time almost exactly three years ago when a leading member of the scene made a remarkable discovery that would alter the world of AMD-based Super Pi benchmarking forever.

Finnish overclocker The Stilt might be a bit of an enigma to most of us on HWBOT but his reputation verges on legendary. Not only is he in possession of the highest ever CPU frequency score recorded on HWBOT (a Vishera AMD FX-8370 pushed to 8722.78MHz!) the guy also single handedly revolutionized AMD Super Pi benchmarking with the discovery of a tweak that substantially improved performance. Here’s a sample of what we wrote back in June 2013:

“We all know AMD is pretty terrible at the Super PI benchmark and it is not likely to change. The benchmark is very old and the instruction set it requires is no longer relevant to real world workloads. It turns out however, that AMD is worse at Super PI calculations than what the architecture is actually capable of.”

“The Stilt from Finland figured out how to significantly speed up the benchmark by going through the BIOS developers guides. The same guides are available to all the BIOS R&D teams of motherboard vendors, but seemingly no one figured out this performance issue. It is quite funny and perhaps sad at the same time that one man is able to beat an entire industry.”

Catch the full story which is captured in all its technical beauty on this forum post entitled ‘The Stilt's Book of Bulldozer - Revelations: Episode 2 (SuperPI / x87)’ . You can also find the original news post from June 21st 2013 here on HWBOT.