Intel does not rule out future budget OC processors

In the good old days, overclocking was a lot of fun as you could sometimes get dramatic clockspeed gains out of chips with relatively little effort. One of the first processors that gained legendary overclocking status was the Celeron 300A as this 1998 low-cost chip could easily be overclocked 50 percent.

Two years ago, Intel surprised overclockers with the Pentium G3258 "Anniversary Edition", a $70 chip with impressive overclocking headroom. But could there by any more of these processors on Intel's roadmap? The Tech Report had a chat with Intel overclocking guy Dan Ragland at the IDF in San Francisco, they heard Intel is thinking about ways to bring back overclocking to more value-oriented chips in the future but Ragland would not commit to any definite statements:

While Ragland unsurprisingly wouldn't commit to any definite statements about Intel's product roadmap, he did indicate that the extreme overclocking community has expressed strong interest in a Pentium AE successor, and that the company has been thinking about ways to expand processor overclocking to more value-oriented chips in the future. That's a glimmer of hope for those of us who just want to have fun with cheap CPUs.

I wouldn't get too excited about the prospect of a Kaby Lake Pentium AE-type chip, though. Ragland cautions that Intel's first job is to turn a profit, and it doesn't take a genius to see that it's easier to get strong margins out of $220-$320 quad-core parts and $1650 ten-core CPUs than it is to justify a $70 part that can beat those chips at their own game.