Slashdot Mirror
Intel Patents Anti-Overclocking Technology
VCAGuy writes "It appears that Intel has pantented a crystal-locking technology to lock processors to the processor's clock speed. The Inquirer has a story about it, and you can read the patent description from the USPTO. Let's hope AMD doesn't try to copy this..."
This reminds me alot like a form of DRM, you buy the chip, but Intel tells you what you can and can't do with it, which type of motherboard you're allowed to use it in maybe? Who the hell knows anymore...
Posting useless rant since 2003.
i stopped trying to over clock my processor when i blew up a perfectly fine Pentium II 233 when i tried to get it to run at 266.. it worked for a month and then never worked again.. *sniffle* So now unless i have a spare processor lying around i don't risk it.
this will fall by the wayside, but what logic prompts this kind of thing ??? EVERYONE already knows if you mess with the multiplier and OC hardware you ash the warranty on the spot. Does Intel feel the need to do this for legal protection or is it a precursor to somthing darker... ****sinister chuckle****
AMD has been my CPU of choice for quite sometime, I just really hope they keep up the good work.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If a 19 year old raver goes in to a mercedes dealership and buys a car, they don't turn him down. That doesn't mean they'll start marketting towards 19 year old ravers, though. Its about who they can sell the most to, at the higher price.
And I tell you, AMD has always had a heat issue, and still does. Heat will more and more be a really big deal with smaller and smaller things, too. I buy AMD when I feel generous, just to help the underdog. But of all the systems I have, the intel systems are FAR more stable.
The question is, will the process of disabling the anti-overlocking measures be considered a violation of the DMCA (breaking encryption, or some loophole thereof). Well, like everyone else is saying, as long as AMD doesn't follow the same path, we have nothing to worry about.
According to the block diagram, they compare the (divided down) system clock with a 32.768KHz reference crystal. I'm thinking they can't put the ref crystal on the CPU die, and if it's external it can be replaced with a slightly (or grossly) faster one.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
Why the hell would you take the time and bother to do this?
Intel does this mainly because in the past there have been retailers sell a slower chip that has been overclocked as a faster chip. This gives some consumers a lower quality chip than they paid for. It can give alot of bad PR for the company if when someone's processor has problems (which may not be very obvious). A few problems can cause alot of people to be skeptical about buying intel or not (whether or not their fears are justified). The solution is just lock everything into the speed that they are actually advertising. Like it or not, overclocker's are a very small portion of their market and so they can allow a small portion of people to be angry while most of their customers are happy.
It's a fairly simple system. You stick an oscillator of known frequency (32.768 kHz in this case) on the chip, and then use that to count the inputed clock rate.
If you count too many clock pules to each refference pulse, then you can modify behaviour on the basis of that. I's interesting to note that the patent talks about CPU's going as fast as 500 MHz, and talks about 1995 as recent. So all the talk about dodgy resellers was probably topical way back when it was written, when, if I recall, there were a few resellers overclocking chips on the quiet. I think that this is a patent whose time has come and gone.
More worrying, it talks about under-clocking detection, as if it's a symptom of faulty hardware. Well, my recent brush with a failed fan ment I underclocked my CPU, to alow it to function without overheating - I sincearly hope that Intel doesn't intend to prevent that.
But you don't actively push away people when there is no tangible benefit for others to remove the feature. The only benefit I could see would be to avert remarking, but frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if other approaches were tried (i.e. cracked BIOSes that overstate clock speed)
AMD has the right idea-- allow overclocking, but make it tamper-evident (crossed L1 bridges)
It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
The only good thing Intel could announce about this technology is that they're trying to protect the consumers from frying their CPU's while doing something they may not have the expertise to do.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Well, there are a few issues.
1). Resellers that act with very limited warranty that sell overclocked machines. The machine fails, Intel's reputation suffers. Intel wants to prevent this.
2). People who overclock and then send in the CPU for a replacement for free.
Presumably, Intel will still sell CPUs without this protection on a no-warranty basis so people can overclock if they like, and Intel loses neither money nor reputation.
If I want to spend my hard earned money to purchase a CPU that I wish to overclock and eke out a modest performance increase, then I should be able to OC it without marketing intervention.
If I chose to void my warranty by overclocking my CPU, then that too is my choice. Rather than limiting the speed of the CPU, why not put a one-time flashable register in the CPU that is set when a CPU is run above its intended speed for X amount of time, thus proving that a warranty is void.
By putting a frequency/speed limiter into a CPUs construction, Intel could then make generically speedy CPU and throttle it back and offer a 'value' CPU, and subsequently inflate the cost of less throttled CPUs. Remember back to the 486DX/SX days where they disabled the math co-processor in a 486DX and sold them as 'value' 486SX processors?
What idiot on a corporate IT team would overclock a CPU? Not many worth their paycheck, that's for sure. At least not while it has any value on the books.
My guess is that Intel is targeting the home market so the clever neighbor kid can't install a $100 Celery in some guy's PC and overclock it to beat the latest $500 CPU in benchmarks.
Or, more likely, they're trying to combat shady overclocking practices by vendor which might have bad reliability issues and give Intel a bad name.
Method of processing duck feet
It would seem to me that the vast majority of the AMD overclocking community is interested in overclocking older chips that have been significantly reduced in price. So how is it that selling off your old chips at a discounted price (to reduce overhead) is a good buisness model?
Good idea. Perhaps there's prior art, but I don't think the patent itself is an issue (or at least there are much worse patents in the world to gripe over).
As for overclocking, the diagram just shows a signal going out that latches when the chip is overclocked. What a processor DOES with it is an entirely other story. A cool extension would be a pin to a motherboard, and allowing the BIOS to actually give a big "HEY, I'M OVERCLOCKED" message on startup. Those who get reseller-overclocked chips (and it happens!) know they've been shafted. Those who are overclockers know they're cool (well... quite hot actually... nevermind).
At least I'd HOPE they'd put some way around it for those truly interested in overclocking.
with this technology inplace, Intel will be able to prosecute OC'ers under the DMCA, similar to the recent Lexmark case, where Lexmark sued a company for providing mod chips that allowed replacement toners to be used other than the ones made by lexmark. the whole story can be found at http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,57866,00 .html
IMHO this is a good thing. If both Intel and AMD cpus are completely overclock-proof this will lead to people having to buy the higher-clocked cpus, which lead to more money being pumped into the two cpu giants. What does that lead to? Eventually a better, more stable technology economy. If you really want to keep overclocking, you could always go to VIA and Transmeta chips. I'm fairly sure that they won't follow suit and keep their cpus clear of anti-overclocking facilities.
><));>
Truth is, overclocking is a very healthy thing for the PC industry.
The reason is that noone, except maybe Transmeta, has made any significant headway in making chips run cooler. Temperature management is just as important as transistor density. We all know that the best way to improve the performance of a processer is to supercool it.
Thanks to overclockers, there are now dozens of independant companies building supercooling products for processors. That wouldn't happen if overclocking was "disabled" as an industry standard. Ten years from now I'd love to have the latest and greatest chip, but I'd also like to know I have the option of buying a $50 kit that will nearly double the speed of my system.
Supercooling your PC is just like installing a supercharger on your car. The only difference is that a supercharger costs $500, and a supercooler may end up costing next to nothing. It's a win-win situation.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Looking at the diagram with the article, this appears to prevent people underclocking as well.
I have underclocked chips before to reduce power and cooling requirements, so this is annoying.
That was a great article.
Assuming that they care about that in the first place, one wonders whether they put any of what must have been considerable effort into finding a win-win solution. It seems (to my unknowledgable mind) that it wouldn't be difficult to build in an overclocking "fuse" (most likely logic, not an actual fusible link) to record seriously out of spec voltages or temps or clock rates. Overclock as you please, but the instant the "fuse" pops, your warranty is void. It seems as though something like this might actually be simpler than continually re-engineering the chip to defeat the latest OC hack.
Assuming they care in the first place.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
Why can't they simply run the CPU clock from the internal crystal then ? Motorola has embedded processors that run a PLL off 32KHz watch crystal. The Motorola processor in my Palm does that.
Even OC192 (~10Gbps) optics can reference off an external 8KHz reference clocks.
Actually, you already do that every time you boot up the computer.
x86 processors emulate a 8088 4.77 MHz processor until the bootstrap shifts it into 32 bit mode.