Posted on Monday, May 12 2008 @ 22:58 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
FUD Zilla
reckons Intel is going to put an overclock lock on its Nehalem processors. The site says there won't be an easy workaround and that overclockers will be forced to buy the more expensive Bloomfield processors:
Until now, we didn't know how this had been implemented, but we've learned some more about it and it looks like there is no easy workaround. As these processors have the memory controller and a few more bits integrated into the CPU itself, Intel suddenly has a lot more control than it has had with past designs that utilized a separate chipset which contains the memory controller.
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 disregard the information from the PCH if it's not a correct value.
