Well if this turns out to be as serious as it sounds, it’ll be a massive blow to Intel’s image (in my book) and give plenty of people reason to switch to AMD. As the story goes, Intel’s upcoming Sandy Bridge platform will completely switch up the current Core i3/i5/i7 way of overclocking. As it stands now, overclocking enthusiasts ramp up the base clock (which starts at 133MHz) in order to speed up the processor itself and RAM — those are the two biggest goals anyway. But Sandy Bridge ties everything — And I mean everything! — into the base clock: USB, SATA, PCI, PCI-E, CPU cores, Uncore, and RAM.
“Awesome” you say? On the surface, it simplifies things by having less clocks to keep track of and in theory makes things cheaper for motherboard manufacturers. The only negative side effect is that early testing of said platform has revealed overclocking is severely neutered. So much so that even a mere 5MHz overclock can cause system instability…
Bit-tech had the chance to speak with several Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers regarding the subject to which they found out that even paltry overclocks by as little as 5MHz saw the newly acquainted SATA and USB bus to fail and corrupt, as they’re a fair bit more sensitive to such things.
Whether Intel was merely doing this to make things easier and cheaper or to force users to pay more for higher spec’d processors is unconfirmed. Though honestly, would Intel ever admit to the latter? Of course not. For now, pc building enthusiasts who were eying the Sandy Bridge P67 chipset as a potential upgrade path may want to hold off. In the meantime, hopefully motherboard manufacturers will find a way around this depressing limitation.
On a much more pleasing, lighter note: (Google Translated) mentions much greener pastures for the higher-end LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E and “Patsburg” chipsets (upgrades to current X58 and 1366 platforms) in that those platforms in particular will continue on with the current design — multiple base clocks and much better overclocking potential.
Truth be told, I myself was only looking at the higher-end 2011 chipset as a future upgrade, so I’m not too depressed by this news. Those who were looking at P67 being an affordable speed demon, however, will face a much rougher time over the next few months.
One other thing to consider is the K-series chips that feature unlocked multipliers. As we’ve seen from the current Core i3/i5/i7, top-model chips with unlocked multipliers can end up costing quite a bit more. Obviously Intel would like to charge you for all of that extra speed. But in doing that, Intel is threatening to kill off a huge pool of pc enthusiasts who can’t afford dropping $500, $800, $1,000+ on the processor alone.
If you’re a pc builder/enthusiast, would a limit such as the one highlighted above push you to a higher end Intel chipset, or even more drastic, another manufacturer — AMD?
TomsHardware > Bit Tech
