Intel to drop overclocking for mainstream Nehalems

[martian_aphid]

If the market in enthusiasts is so small and most of their sales go to big companys like dell, etc which is of course true - it makes absolutely no sense at all to remove overclocking abilities. Look at it this way - they are selling the bulk of their chips to the oem companies, these will never be overclocked anyway since their bioses will probabaly prevent it. So you have a smaller but dedicated protion of the market which buys chips to overclock - they buy cheap to use the headroom, some may buy cheap because of income and other for value for money. Now if you remove overclocking abilities you do nothing to oem, they are unaffected, but the enthusuastists have now been stuck in the same category as the average user. They have only two choices - a cheap chip which will never be able to be pushed any further or shell out for an overpriced chip to be able to get the extra performance. Now that minority of enthusiasts already exists who have disposable incomes and will already buy the most expensive parts but i don't see intel forcing the rest of the enthusiasts to prescribe to the most expensive options too. I see no benefit for intel in this and certainly see them losing about - really stupid decision if they go ahead with it.

apologies for the rant =D

 

[p4radox]

99.9% Where is that figure from?? .01% is the enthusiast marker? Doubt it.

It was only a guess. But I reckon it's not far from the truth.

The big OEMs get the majority of the hardware before it makes it to the likes of OcUK.

edit: oh, and 100 - 99.9 = 0.1

 

[martian_aphid]

Yea but even if your estimate was correct which i doubt 0.1% is but anyway. Even if the enthusiast market is a small portion why destroy it completely? It's like a supermarket saying to its customers under 18, "sorry you are a minority and you don't spend that much anyway so gtfo!"

 

[Fothsn]

Well its being 5yrs since I was last in education so please excuse the dodgy maths

I would like to think the market is quite big defiantly not 0.1%




Edit/ And what Martian is saying really echoes my thoughts aswell..

 

[Helios1234]

im confused i thought nehalm is LGA1366 socket?

According to wiki LGA1366 is reserved for bloomfield which is the high end desktop variant. The mainstream cpus, Lynnfield and Havendale, will be on LGA1160.

 

[NathanE]

Does not surprise me at all. Intel wanted to do this with the Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 except the competition at the time was too great.

Now that competition has effectively drooped to its lowest level in probably 15 years Intel can afford to behave more monopolistic.

 

[.:MBK:.]

so basically youll only be able to go OCing mad on the top end gear

funny, i thought most OCing nutters did this anyway, yes some OC things like E2xxx just to see how far the things goes (this is the part Intel seem to want to eliminate) so some OCing and performance enthusiasts will still be buying, and clocking the higher end gear.

if however they make it so you can only overclock intel extreme parts, then people might be rather unhappy


thats assuming there is any ounce of truth in that article

 

[WillSpengler]

Well its being 5yrs since I was last in education so please excuse the dodgy maths

I would like to think the market is quite big defiantly not 0.1%

Go look in an office block. Room after room after room filled with PC's.

How many of the hundreds there are overclocked?

The IT labs at my uni, hundreds and hundreds of PC's. Any overclocked? Nope.


How many PC's do I have in my house? four, any overclocked? nope. Mine was once, but it isnt a system bottle neck at stock! Loads of my mates with self built PC's, and none of them are running OC'd. Again, each of them has more than one PC per household too.

Even if the enthusiast market is more than 0.1%, you can bet it is probably still lower than 1%.

 

[WillSpengler]

Another thing is, maybe Intel will be running the new processors harder than before?

Remember, we are starting to approach limits on this stuff. A 22 nm process is probably the absolute limit we are going to reach using the CMOS process, thought we could get smaller using SET's and the like.

The closer we get to these limits, the tighter the tolerances are going to be, it will start becoming a case of the CPU's not being capable of running at higher frequencies or voltages than designed.

 

[MTA99]

SNIP...apologies for the rant =D

I take your point but I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Isn't this more about Intel saving money/silicon on not having overclocking features on an on-chip NB? Intel sell vast quantities of chips to OEMs who will never overclock so why design in features that 99.9% (or is it 99.99% ) of customers will never use? From a business point of view it makes perfect sense.

Someone will find a way round it, you're old enough to remember pencil mods and golden fingers right?

 

[.:MBK:.]

true, current CPU architecture is reaching its limitations, something has to give and the margin for tollerance will likely decrease

 

[Fothsn]

Go look in an office block. Room after room after room filled with PC's.

How many of the hundreds there are overclocked?

The IT labs at my uni, hundreds and hundreds of PC's. Any overclocked? Nope.


How many PC's do I have in my house? four, any overclocked? nope. Mine was once, but it isnt a system bottle neck at stock! Loads of my mates with self built PC's, and none of them are running OC'd. Again, each of them has more than one PC per household too.

Even if the enthusiast market is more than 0.1%, you can bet it is probably still lower than 1%.

Well this is an enthusiast website full of people who overclock there PC's there are hundreds out there which are bigger than this site dedicated to overclocking, yes the market share will be low let’s look at it from a different prospective if it’s that low why would Intel crush this little niche market?

 

[martian_aphid]

Let's not forget the enthusiast market grows from the general market as people become more comfortable with computing and it becomes something people grow up with from an early age. If there were say 100,000 [just as a figure] people who may oc 5 years ago, then I have no doubt that figure has increased 10 fold if not more and is set to increase again. With the enthusiast market on the rise it makes no sense to shun them. However, I do take the point about lower tolerances as we reach potential hardware limits, it may be this is the factor?

 

[Corasik]

Depends what you consider high end. In terms of Penryn, Intel consider the E9450 to be a high end part mainstream , the E9550 to be performance desktop, and the E9770 obviously extreme desktop.

The nehalem equivilents to these parts should all be on bloomsfield, and overclockable.

However the 9300 would probably be on the lower performance platform.

I would have thought that most enthusiasts would want the additional features offered by the bloomsfield platform (tripple channel DDR), and a new bus for expansion cards called quickpath. (which no doubt the motherboard will use to supply PCIe ports).

The Havendale chipset takes processors with a built in GPU, and a low performance GPU at that. Its really for OEM's and people who arnt interested in performance.

 

[Columbo]

Go look in an office block. Room after room after room filled with PC's.

How many of the hundreds there are overclocked?

The IT labs at my uni, hundreds and hundreds of PC's. Any overclocked? Nope.


How many PC's do I have in my house? four, any overclocked? nope. Mine was once, but it isnt a system bottle neck at stock! Loads of my mates with self built PC's, and none of them are running OC'd. Again, each of them has more than one PC per household too.

Even if the enthusiast market is more than 0.1%, you can bet it is probably still lower than 1%.

There's a reverse argument here.....

If this is true and if we are saying that less than 1% of the total sales of Intel chips are oveclocked, then why would they care if their chips are overclockable or not. Surely if this less than 1% does'nt make any difference then surely they would be just happy to leave things as they are.

Looks to me like this is Intel taking advantage of their market dominance and is exactly why AMD need to get back on track and soon. It was because of the Athlon 64's that Intel had to churn out the Conroe's lets just hope that AMD's future chips can compete.

Additionally even if mobo manufacturers come up with some sort of workaround for this you can bet your mortgage that this facility will come at a premium cost to the end users.

IF this is true, it can only be bad news.

 

[MTA99]

Well this is an enthusiast website full of people who overclock there PC's there are hundreds out there which are bigger than this site dedicated to overclocking, yes the market share will be low let’s look at it from a different prospective if it’s that low why would Intel crush this little niche market?

They would "crush" that market because they don't look at it from the same point of view as you. You (by virtue of us having this discussion) are an "overclocker", an enthusiast. By your own admission you (and I) are a niche market. If its not commercially viable for them to allow (or design in) overclocking then while you might think it "suxxors" they continue selling to OEMs and fanboys while die-hard overclockers go sulking over to AMD

 

[WillSpengler]

Well this is an enthusiast website full of people who overclock there PC's there are hundreds out there which are bigger than this site dedicated to overclocking, yes the market share will be low let’s look at it from a different prospective if it’s that low why would Intel crush this little niche market?

Hundreds of thousands, while a huge number is only a tiny fraction of billions. Also see my reply below . . .

There's a reverse argument here.....

If this is true and if we are saying that less than 1% of the total sales of Intel chips are oveclocked, then why would they care if their chips are overclockable or not. Surely if this less than 1% does'nt make any difference then surely they would be just happy to leave things as they are.

Looks to me like this is Intel taking advantage of their market dominance and is exactly why AMD need to get back on track and soon. It was because of the Athlon 64's that Intel had to churn out the Conroe's lets just hope that AMD's future chips can compete.

Additionally even if mobo manufacturers come up with some sort of workaround for this you can bet your mortgage that this facility will come at a premium cost to the end users.

IF this is true, it can only be bad news.

Take it neither of you cared to read into my other post? Where I said that it could be due to the increasing tolerances required for chips. And that they won't be too bothered as it will only affect a small %-age.

We are moving down to 45nm scale process on chips now. To improve architechture they are also moving the CMOS processes closer together. The theoretical limit is going to be 22nm. The problem is that getting this small introduces many funky factors (read up on Quantum Tunnelling). So it will be required to introduce and maintain tight tolerances on chips.

And as a point of scale, a single copper atom is ~0.25 (or is it 0.5?) nm.

 

[cavemanoc]

I wasn't aware that intel did support overclocking? Ever since they locked the multipliers back in the original celeron days it's been up to the mobo manufacturers to enable it? Admittedly they allow a very few chips out unlocked, but most are explicitly not for overclocking - voids the warranty?

 

[martian_aphid]

500,000 at say £150 each = £75 million, hardly a figure to scoff at

a significant enough share of the market to care about

 

[mrthingyx]

And as a point of scale, a single copper atom is ~0.25 (or is it 0.5?) nm.

Probably about right: cobalt atoms sit around 4Angstroms apart, so Copper would be somewhere in that region. I think you need to refer to Silicon's, too, but hey.

As to overclocking, think of it this way: what makes Intel more money? Lots of people not buying high-end, high-margin processors because they can get the same performance out of a £45 effort? Or a good proportion of people not being able to do that and saving up to buy high-end, high margin processors?

You have to remember: this is an overclocking forum where the majority of users will overclock, have a medium/high-end graphics card and something in the region of a 22" LCD monitor or thereabouts...

In the real world, people still have CRTs, 15" LCD, Athlon XPs/P3s, Radeon 7000s/Matroxes, etc. In terms of market trends, laptops are looking to be the big development platform in the coming years. And almost none of those are overclocked.

So what will Intel lose out on by restricted overclocking to a budget platform? Probably not even enough for an accountant to distinguish between it and normal market fluctuations.