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  • HollyDOL - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    Interesting news, alas I feel sorry for the 14nm cpu ran on 1.824V. I am all up for reasonable overclocking where it makes sense, but this is only a bit less than controlled destruction. How long lifespan can mobo/cpu have under such conditions?
  • Ian Cutress - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    The usual argument is that a Formula 1 engine only works for 1000-2000 miles, or the tyres are only good for 150 a set. You're not going to take it down the shops like that, and in F1 it's practically destroyed when you're done. But it sure makes you go fastest.

    Sure it's not a like-to-like comparison and you can pick holes out of it, but it captures the essence. (Any LN2 overclocking done properly doesn't destroy the chip. There are very few 'suicide runs' these days. There is something about long term degradation, but some individual chips are used 50-100+ times easily in this scenario and work great again the next time around as well.)
  • HollyDOL - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    Ye, I know the analogy between F1, though there are some fundamental differences... With OCed chip, you don't achieve any technological advancement, don't try new architecture etc... I don't see any experimental cooling solution based on some crazy maths and physics developed as an outcome, while F1 development is all about optimizations and tech advancements. Like "supercool new feature X or composite material Y" of this year's Ferrari can make it to a mass production cars in 5 years (example).

    Ofc, there is the "need for speed" factor is there, both with F1 and CPUs, but that's quite like all there is in common.

    So like this, while admittedly nice achievement, it seems like wasting of good chip. It's more like taking your road car and lowering cylinders by some insane value... You'll get helluva performance, which the rest of the car usually can't handle, for a short time and then you are about to change engine (and maybe other parts too if they can't handle increased stress).
  • Murloc - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    you're right, but I guess that many other competitions don't have a motive except the competition itself either, and sponsoring this stuff provides free advertisement when nerds discuss about it.
  • sna1970 - Tuesday, December 15, 2015 - link

    hello Ian ,

    Can you please see if the new Skylake Xeons can be overclocked or not ?
  • Murloc - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    it doesn't matter because if you need more power buying more chips and cooling them conventionally costs less than using an extremely overclocked chip cooled with liquid nitrogen (and all the supply chain that involves).

    If it lasts enough to make the benchmark, that's good enough.
  • 0razor1 - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    Is Intel going to allow this ( isn't this mentioned somewhere in their chip-set licencing agreement with mobo manufacturers post B85 overclocking motherboards etc?) on their unlocked SKUs?

    I see microcode updating or some other hash cropping up stopping this dead in it's tracks going forward. Obviously, decoupling the BCLK with the PCI lanes was going to give this flexibility and Intel would have known the obvious risks- this will hurt them since one will not need to go in for K editions any more!

    This is almost as flexible as over-clocking the K10 with PCI base clock and to some extent FSB over-clocking of old ( P4 anyone?) and will hurt margins ( which are fat as there are thank you no competition). This will further hit AMD since they provide OC'able chips at lower price points that can really be juiced.
  • bill.rookard - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    That's the problem I see as well. Just this last year IIRC there was the same problem with those with the G3258 on a non-Z board...
  • Samus - Saturday, December 12, 2015 - link

    IF Intel comes down hard on mainboard partners, there will be a microcode community with instructions on embedding them to the BIOS ROM for flashing. Fortunately we're not at the point (yet) that motherboard BIOS must be signed code in order to flash.
  • revanchrist - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    www.jagatoc.com/2015/12/hands-on-review-overclocking-bclk-core-i3-6100-on-supermicro-c7h170-m/
  • mapesdhs - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    Financial transaction processing is often GPU accelerated, so CPU performance is less relevant, and it's unlikely that such work would be done on oc'd systems anyway given the need for reliable processing.
  • Ian Cutress - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    For financial compute I agree, but when it comes to HFT then latency matters as well. That's why you have some quants investing in contractors to develop sub-zero cooled systems for it.
  • FunBunny2 - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    -- That's why you have some quants investing in contractors to develop sub-zero cooled systems for it.

    Ah the days of IBM 360/370 machines on raised floors, with water cooling are back. Even for some of their newest mainframes, which last had water cooling standard in 1995.
  • ImSpartacus - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    I didn't know hft was getting THAT crazy. That seems excessive.
  • otherwise - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    Overclocked servers actually are a thing in the HFT world. You can even buy servers off the shelf that while not officially overclocked -- are guaranteed to run at max turbo regardless of load. Here is supermicro's version: http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/Hyper-Speed...
  • MrSpadge - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    There's also a report from a German Tech site that someone made multicore enhancement work on Skylake Non-K by accident: the Asus OC tool installed for a socket 2011 system was able to make that change when bootet up with a Skylake system. The newer version which officially supports socket 1151 doesn't offer this option any more.

    So this is also clearly just an artificial limit. But it seems like noone with the knowledge and/or source code released that functionality into a regular tool.
  • ImSpartacus - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    Do you have a link to that story/article?
  • MrSpadge - Saturday, December 12, 2015 - link

    There's the article:
    http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Skylake-S-Codename-2...
    And the message board thread:
    http://extreme.pcgameshardware.de/news-kommentare-...

    (they're both only available in German - sorry)
  • MrSpadge - Saturday, December 12, 2015 - link

    And the guy reporting it is a respected member of that relatively large community, so I think it sounds rather trustworthy.
  • ImSpartacus - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    I would love to see the 6100 and 6320 reviewed if this comes to fruition.

    The 6100 was going for $110 during Black Friday. That would be a monster gaming chip if you get get it closer to 4ghz.
  • wolfemane - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    Picked up the 6320 for $149.99 during a 4 hour sale on newegg cyber Monday. Worth every penny. I'm more impressed with this chip than I was with my 3770k.
  • ImSpartacus - Saturday, December 12, 2015 - link

    Yeah, it's seeming like the clocks really got jacked up on the Skylake duals for this gen. Your 6320 is effectively a 4ghz cpu all the time.
  • JulioFranco - Saturday, December 12, 2015 - link

    Already tested here using BCLK overclocking:
    http://www.techspot.com/review/1108-intel-locked-s...
  • NoSoMo - Thursday, December 17, 2015 - link

    I had to build a new 'general' machine and went with the 6100 for 'bang for the buck'. I don't really game, but do a lot of tasks that have zero benefits from additional cores. That makes single core frequency king. Had I known when I put together this machine that there would eventually be an OC route, I probably would have opted for for the next model up if not the best i3 I could get. As it stands the performance between the i3s on a performance-to-dollar ratio (or any of the skylakes for that matter) the 6100 is king. The 6100 tops the 64 and 500 in single core performance. Let's face it, most users out there who don't game all day, or encode media all day, get the absolute most out of a single core for a given task (dual cores with HT certainly helps as well). If they had a 6390k that could do 4.5 on air without breaking a sweat, I would have grabbed it.
  • xrror - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    You have to give the mobo makers credit on how they "introduced" this feature. I'm pretty sure all the the players knew this was possible, but they were all sitting on it waiting for all of the "bugfix" microcodes from Intel were released.

    The brilliant part is having SuperMicro be the company for the debut. Intel putting sanctions on SuperMicro would be... unwise, since SuperMicro is a big player in the server market.

    Pretty shrewd.

    Also yea, Intel will lock this down with microcode updates. And all new processors off the line will have a "fix" for this by default.

    Unlocked i3 is a nightmare for their market segmentation strategy.

    If Intel can't clamp this down (for some reason) I'd expect another CMPXCHG16b like-situation with the "fix" being ... updated firmware/microcode required. ;p
  • bill.rookard - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    Well, the bad part of that would be anyone who would want to overclock would then be turning off potential updates (such as security updates) which would be a bad thing for Microsoft and Intel.
  • jasonelmore - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    i dont think it will hurt their bottom line much.. maybe a few hundred people do this instead of buying a K CPU...

    it's not gonna be so widespread and i doubt system builders will do it.
  • MrSpadge - Saturday, December 12, 2015 - link

    People are buying the K instead of the non-K because the K can't easily be overlcocked. If this was changed, people would buy the other chip. For the i7 6700 the difference in retail price between those CPUs is far larger than it used to be, due to the scarcity of both models (with the K being even more elusive). I checked availability a few days ago: the cheapest 6700 was 80€ cheaper than the 6700K in Germany.
  • mgl888 - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    This is interesting. I wonder if this feature will be enabled on lower end mobos
  • jasonelmore - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    Overclocking by bclk is nothing new, we've been doing it on nonk CPU's since the sandybridge days..

    Nehalem even did this by default.

    The motherboard carries the burden of the overclock, and it's all up to the power delivery system to keep things stable.. Cheaper power delivery, will mean little overclock.
  • wolfemane - Friday, December 11, 2015 - link

    Long before sandy bridge. I remember tweaking both base clock and multiplier back in the early days of the fx chips and the. The core 2 duos.
  • ImSpartacus - Saturday, December 12, 2015 - link

    You're talking about overclocking via changing the fsb clock, right?
  • wolfemane - Sunday, December 13, 2015 - link

    Yes that's correct.
  • jasonelmore - Sunday, December 13, 2015 - link

    i7 920 overclocked with the BCLK, no FSB
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, December 13, 2015 - link

    E2140 Pentium, 100% overclock, 250 FSB.
  • tential - Sunday, December 13, 2015 - link

    How quickly the floodgates opened when one company was the "only company able to do it".

    If the boards are cheap, we are about to see a LOT of very happy intel users at the lower ends if it can be enabled with a simple BIOS update.
  • ghitz - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link

    Dang it! iGPU has to be disabled in order to use BCLK overclocking. sucks
  • Denithor - Wednesday, December 16, 2015 - link

    This could actually be quite a good thing for Intel. A lot of free buzz, a whole new generation of people interested in overclocking the low end chips versus buying the high end models. And it won't really cost them that much, let's face it the overclocking crowd is miniscule compared to mainstream desktop and the server markets. And if the iGPU has to be disabled to OC like this, it will have ripple effects outward to AMD/nVidia as well.
  • GRIdpOOL - Tuesday, December 29, 2015 - link

    BCLK overclock works really well! I'm running an i5-6500 on a Gigabyte ga-z170n-Gaming 5. It's stable @4320Mhz. I'm sure it will go higher, but a 35% overclock is a great start.

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