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."

Comments

Nice biased wording there

[KZigurs]

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.

Re:Nice biased wording there

[Squiddie]

I try to practice the good enough philosophy, and AMD is good enough. I don't get the whole Intel/AMD fanboyism. I certainly would feel cheated if I just had to have Intel, though.

Re:Nice biased wording there

[apexdawn]

They do have VT-d, but I believe transactional memory is a Haswell only for the moment. I have read nothing on whether AMD will implement such extensions (I could be wrong on this).

-Reed

Re:Nice biased wording there

[Rockoon]

It is also significantly slower buck for buck in real life workloads.

Buck for buck? Are you on crack?

AMD wins the price/performance comparison. Intel wins the peak performance comparison.

Looks to me like you are practicing the big lie for your masters at Intel.

Re:Nice biased wording there

[fredprado]

I am quite sure the extra milliseconds on the operations you have to wait on your computer will be very significant for you.

Re:Nice biased wording there

[localman57]

I practice the time is valuable philosophy. I don't want to wait on my computer any longer than absolutely necessary.

People who really think their time is valuable don't overclock. It's a hobby that tries to squeeze the most out of a given $ of hardware. But after you factor in the amount of time you spend messing around with the thing to try to eek out that additional performance, and add in the lost work time caused by unexpected crashes and instability, you're better off just buying the most expensive hardware you can, and replacing it when something better comes along.

That said, the people who do that need to be grateful to the overclocking crowd. There needs to be bleeding edge people finding out what works and what doesn't, such as the great work they've done with cooling technology. The best of what the overclockers are doing today turns into tomorrow's high end mainstream.

Re:That is dumb

[tapspace]

Guh. Premium, not primium! And annecessary = unnecessary. I suck.

This is why AMD can not die just think of what int

[Joe_Dragon]

This is why AMD can not die just think of what intel will do with out AMD in the market.

Meh.

[nitzmahone]

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.

Re:Meh.

[girlintraining]

In my experiences, they have always outperformed Intel's processors, and generally cost half as much.

That hasn't been the case for several generations of processor design, unfortunately. The top end of the AMD processor line can't compete with Intel on performance. That's why they've gotten so cheap -- so OEMs build systems on them. The 'Intel Tax' puts a lot of their mid-range and above stuff out of reach of the average consumer, and generally you're only finding them in laptops now because of the superior power usage and thermals...

If you want per-unit performance today, you buy Intel. If you want commodity, you buy AMD.

Well, you just killed it for me.

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Does MHz matter anymore?

[BLKMGK]

Add to the list below rendering and those of us who compress and process video - of which I am one. Faster clock speeds can save me HOURS of time and is why I run an overclocked Sandy i7 at over 4ghz. It runs for hours at a time fully slammed with no problems.

So yeah, there are use cases for this outside of your sphere of knowledge.

Re:Sales Pitch

[TopSpin]

I'd imagine nobody codes for this. [TSE]

That is going to be an important feature when programmers eventually leverage it. Hardware assisted optimistic locking can make concurrency easier, safer and more efficient as the CPU takes care of coherency problems usually left to the programmer and CAS instructions. Imagine being able to give each of thousands or millions of actors in a simulation their own independent execution context (instruction pointer, stack, etc.,) all safely sharing state and interacting with each other using simple, bug free logic, as opposed to explicit and error prone locking and synchronization. This has been done with software transactional memory but it frequently fails to scale due to lock contention. Hardware based TM can prevent that contention by avoiding lock writes.

It is extremely cool that Intel is implementing this on x86.

Is it necessary these days?

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

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.

Lies

[s.petry]

AMD has superior FP capabilities. In both CAD and CAE benchmarks, honors always go to AMD for the math. But what really hit me as a big-ole liar fanboi comment was the one about CAD rendering. The majority of that is not related to your CPU, but your GPU. The portion of GPU that is CPU related still benefits from AMD chips which have the memory at the front end of the chip, compared to the Intel that has the memory pipeline as far back as possible in order to claim "we have more MHz than AMD".

Video compression really depends on who's chip the code has been modified for (if any). As with CAE math, native chip math functions are much faster on AMD.

I run annual benchmarks inside companies for Intel vs. AMD and have for over a decade. These benchmarks show real world performance of Unigraphics, CATIA, HyperMesh, MSC Patran, Ansys, and Muses. CATIA and Ansys are always the worst on AMD, as they have both been assimilated by DirectX over OpenGL with no option to force OpenGL. They still however slightly favor AMD over Intel.

I don't rely on Tom's hardware or someone else for opinion, since Tom's showed us long ago that you can't trust "independent" benchmarks for much. I have read benchmark reports from others that indicate the opposite, but have yet to have anyone recreate their results for me. I use real decks and models from real products, I don't use code exercising a subset of CPU instructions as fast as it possibly can.