Slashdot Mirror
Intel Removes "Free" Overclocking From Standard Haswell CPUs
crookedvulture writes "With its Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors, Intel allowed standard Core i5 and i7 CPUs to be overclocked by up to 400MHz using Turbo multipliers. Reaching for higher speeds required pricier K-series chips, but everyone got access to a little "free" clock headroom. Haswell isn't quite so accommodating. Intel has disabled limited multiplier control for non-K CPUs, effectively limiting overclocking to the Core i7-4770K and i5-4670K. Those chips cost $20-30 more than their standard counterparts, and surprisingly, they're missing a few features. The K-series parts lack the support for transactional memory extensions and VT-d device virtualization included with standard Haswell CPUs. PC enthusiasts now have to choose between overclocking and support for certain features even when purchasing premium Intel processors. AMD also has overclocking-friendly K-series parts, but it offers more models at lower prices, and it doesn't remove features available on standard CPUs."
AMD also has overclocking-friendly K-series parts, but it offers more models at lower prices, and it doesn't remove features available on standard CPUs.
It is also significantly slower buck for buck in real life workloads.
That's because they are not number one. Like Avis, they have to try harder.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This is why AMD can not die just think of what intel will do with out AMD in the market.
I've never found overclocking to be worth the trouble. Anytime there's a stability issue with an overclocked PC, there's always that nagging doubt that all my troubleshooting is for naught, because it was a fluke bit fail due to the overclocking. Life's too short- skip the anxiety and run your processor at it's rated speed.
The K-series parts lack the support for transactional memory extensions and VT-d device virtualization
Yeah, well, fun fact... a lot of enthusiasts like myself like things like VMWare, which depend on this kind of thing. Deleting those features from the unlocked line means I just won't buy them... one of the big drivers for overclocking is to run virtualization. You might think it's "just gamers" doing this, but a lot of us do network and system administration and deployment and like the ability of having a "lab in a box" offered by current processors. You take that away and you're going to find your bottom line hurting, possibly more than a little.
I don't know which of your marketing assclowns came up with this idea as a revenue generating measure, but it's going to backfire in their face and I hope when it does you fire their ass, apologize, and never try this again. You're only succeeding in driving us towards commodity hardware like AMDs offerings... All they need to capitalize on the market you've just shit on now is offer mainboards with multiple sockets for their CPUs and make the mainboards cheap and the core system very energy efficient... and not only will the enthusiasts ditch you, but so will the data centers...
You're opening a can of worms here. Bad plan, darlings.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Yes, I remember the good ol' days when you can get a $100 CPU and make it work like a $800 one. I remember in particular the days of buying a cheap Celeron and having it perform like much more expensive Pentium II or even P3.
And I also remember days of headaches with stability issues, over heating and other stupid problems all to squeeze a few extra FPS out of Doom.
Nobody overclocks anymore, and if they do, it like getting a trophy for trolling a blog. Its completely unnecessary and doesn't really offer anything except a feel good, slap on the thy own back when you see your completely arbitrary and virtual benchmark numbers rise up while you ruin your CPU.
What needs the extra performance these days? You need to Tweet faster? Like on Facebook faster? Browse a website factions of milliseconds faster?
Games used to drive overclocking but GPU's are where game performance lies these days. Sure maybe overclocking your CPU by 50% might offer 1% more FPS, but who the fuck really cares, nobody with a life that is.
Intel realizes that the enthusiast market for PC's has nose dived and its obviously cheaper to produce CPU's where you don't have to worry about the kind of performance tolerances that are required for overclocking.
And I don't think "enterprise" level developers are buying cheap computers and then overclocking to get better VM performance. I mean really? If you consider yourself an "enterprise" developer then get the "enterprise" to buy you a decent workstation or VM server. I don't think your "enterprise" wants you to spend days trying to optimize performance on your workstation, I'd fire anybody that wastes any amount of time in a BIOS.
I would say Intel should focus on offering one "enthusiast" level CPU that is completely unlocked for overclocking. I mean if people want to burn out their CPU repeatedly its more money from a market segment that is drying up, but I think in general Intel or any CPU company should not have to worry about providing overclockable CPU's across their product line.
The bottom line is that benchmarks aside, if you ever looked at your Task Manager you'd probably realize that your CPU is idling at 1% usage 99% of the time, so you want to make the System Idle task run faster? I don't get it anymore.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The problem is that people buying K parts and building PCs around them are pc enthusiasts.
Is my gaming desktop going to do double duty as a production Xen server? Of -course- not. At least not at the same time.
But if I look around my home office, the cpu's that used to be in my gaming PCs ... one is in a Xen server that I'm using actively. And another is a vmware server.
But as I use both xen and vmware for work, having these 'toy' servers at home has been helpful for learning, and experimenting. I definitely want cpus that support these technologies. I expect I'll build a hyper-V unit sooner than later too.
The only question i have about intel's move is "why" is this some sort of misguided marketing nonsense, or do these features perhaps interfere with the overclockability of the K cpus. Maybe transactional memory and hardware virtualization don't over clock well ? If that' the case... I get it.
Otherwise, I'm completely stumped as to why intel is removing it.
It could become a feature once mainstream, as it dramatically helps thread scaling. I will agree that it is not much of a current selling point and may not become one for a long while, depending on threaded programming up-take or OS advantages.
As someone who writes the software you're probably using for your video compression:
Fuck you, Fuck you, Fuck you!
I have wasted more of my life in idiotic bullshit bug reports from people with clocked to hell hardware. A one in ten thousand failure rate times hundreds of thousands of OCed users = big waste of my @#$@ time. There is a reason processor vendors sell parts clocked at the speeds they do.