It wasn’t long ago the first story about how Intel was trying to stop people from overclocking its mid-range chips of the upcoming Nehalem family was posted. We doubted the fact that Intel would actively work against partners as we found little to no support for these claims. The next story has now been posted by the people over at Fudzilla and without trying to offend anyone, it looks a bit silly. Nehalem is a whole new architecture and it’s a bit different from today’s Core architecture.
“As Intel seems to want to push the much more expensive Bloomfield platform to overclockers, the company implemented a lock that prevents these new processors from being overclocked by adding two PLL clock generators, one inside the CPU itself and one in the PCH.
This might not sound like it’s a big problem in itself, but what Intel has done is that these two will clock generators will reference each other; and this means that just changing the bus speed won’t have any effect if you’re trying to overclock the CPU as it will dissregard the information from the PCH if it’s not a correct value.”
While it’s true Intel has moved the PLL and memory controller on-die from the northbridge, it’s not to stop people from overclocking, its to save costs, improve performance and reduce power. And then there’s the big plus that less circuits are required to make the motherboard, which makes it cheaper too. This will please more than 95% of all buyers. The problem is that we don’t know if the PLL/reference frequency will be locked from factory, but the multiplier most likely will be.
Bloomfield, the high-end sort, will sport an internal QPI (QuickPath Interconnect) controller, which will be used to overclock the processor. The frequency of the QPI controller will be the reference through which memory and clock frequency will be calculated via dividers. The frequency of the QPI controller is in turn controlled by manipulating the PLL inside the Tylersbyrg/X58 northbridge. The way we’re used to do things, more or less.
Lynnfield and Havendale lacks the QPI controller, and the northbridge PLL has been moved on-die, which makes it hard to find any real means for altering the clock frequency, IF the PLL is locked, which we can’t be certain it is. Fudzilla also states that there is a second PLL which acts as a roadblock for anyone who wants to overclock. We haven’t seen or heard of anything like that. With lack of inside information on the exact structure of the mid-range Nehalem chips, we can’t be certain of anything right now, but looking at the architecture we can only conclude that overclocking will be different, but there’s not much saying it will be impossible.
Lynnfield and Havendale may be mid-range, but they are what Nehalem is mainly about. The northbridge has been moved onto the processor and the more complete package will save both Intel and the consumers a lot of money. The problem is that this approach made it harder to overclock them, which alienated the enthusiast community. I.e. me and you. That’s why Bloomfield was created so that there would still be an enthusiast option for the Intel users, and if you’re worried you will have to pay $1,000 to get a processor that can actually be overclocked, don’t be. There will be more affordable Bloomfields, although not as cheap as the mid-range.
That Intel is “unlikely to give out this information to third-party motherboard manufacturers” is something the FUD crew will have present some evidence for, because that seems like something that would come back and bite Intel hard on the ass. Partners are prone to find workarounds when there’s a lot of publicity and consumer support to be gained. If Intel’s doesn’t give out this information, there will be a race betwen ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, abit, DFI, and the rest to see who will get the overclocking of mid-range Nehalem chips first. We’re not saying it’s going to be easy, but its unavoidable more or less.
That is if it’s even possible to do so, which we sincerely hope. Otherwise AMD might be back in charge with the mid-range overclockers, which is actually the majority of all overclockers. It doesn’t matter if AMD’s processors might be slower to begin with, it’s the thrill of overclocking them that makes us tick. Pushing them step further each time, and if Intel’s processors won’t overclock people will just have to overclock AMD’s processors.
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