Intel Removes "Free" Overclocking From Standard Haswell CPUs 339
crookedvulture writes "With its Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors, Intel allowed standard Core i5 and i7 CPUs to be overclocked by up to 400MHz using Turbo multipliers. Reaching for higher speeds required pricier K-series chips, but everyone got access to a little "free" clock headroom. Haswell isn't quite so accommodating. Intel has disabled limited multiplier control for non-K CPUs, effectively limiting overclocking to the Core i7-4770K and i5-4670K. Those chips cost $20-30 more than their standard counterparts, and surprisingly, they're missing a few features. The K-series parts lack the support for transactional memory extensions and VT-d device virtualization included with standard Haswell CPUs. PC enthusiasts now have to choose between overclocking and support for certain features even when purchasing premium Intel processors. AMD also has overclocking-friendly K-series parts, but it offers more models at lower prices, and it doesn't remove features available on standard CPUs."
Re:That is dumb (Score:5, Informative)
Guh. Premium, not primium! And annecessary = unnecessary. I suck.
Not really a big shock (Score:3, Informative)
Well, "free" clock headroom aside, Intel removing features from the K series parts (VT-d, etc.) has been going on since Sandy Bridge I believe. Basically, if you want the best of both worlds you will want to invest in an Extreme Edition processor. As quick search on ark will show, the 3770K does not have VT-d while the 3930K does.
-Reed
Re:Nice biased wording there (Score:4, Informative)
They do have VT-d, but I believe transactional memory is a Haswell only for the moment. I have read nothing on whether AMD will implement such extensions (I could be wrong on this).
-Reed
Re:Nice biased wording there (Score:5, Informative)
It is also significantly slower buck for buck in real life workloads.
Buck for buck? Are you on crack?
AMD wins the price/performance comparison. Intel wins the peak performance comparison.
Looks to me like you are practicing the big lie for your masters at Intel.
Re:Does MHz matter anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
Add to the list below rendering and those of us who compress and process video - of which I am one. Faster clock speeds can save me HOURS of time and is why I run an overclocked Sandy i7 at over 4ghz. It runs for hours at a time fully slammed with no problems.
So yeah, there are use cases for this outside of your sphere of knowledge.
Current K CPU also lose VT-d (Score:4, Informative)
Current K rated CPU lose this and possibly some other features. I didn't pay attention to this and found out the hard way when I couldn't run an overclocked ESX-i Sandy machine. Pissed is an understatement! There's no good reason to do this other than to screw with the marketplace.
I've switched to a XEON CPU of Ivy heritage and GL finding a board for one of those that runs ESX-i and can be overclocked. Nearly every machine I own is overclocked and has been for many years and it pisses me off to get jerked around like this by Intel.
Re:Sales Pitch (Score:5, Informative)
I'd imagine nobody codes for this. [TSE]
That is going to be an important feature when programmers eventually leverage it. Hardware assisted optimistic locking can make concurrency easier, safer and more efficient as the CPU takes care of coherency problems usually left to the programmer and CAS instructions. Imagine being able to give each of thousands or millions of actors in a simulation their own independent execution context (instruction pointer, stack, etc.,) all safely sharing state and interacting with each other using simple, bug free logic, as opposed to explicit and error prone locking and synchronization. This has been done with software transactional memory but it frequently fails to scale due to lock contention. Hardware based TM can prevent that contention by avoiding lock writes.
It is extremely cool that Intel is implementing this on x86.
Re:Sales Pitch (Score:2, Informative)
There's a big difference between VT and VT-d. Intel is only disabling VT-d (aka Directed IO) in the processors.
It is an I/O passthrough to a virtual machine (allowing a virtual machine to directly access the IO bus instead of passing through the hypervisor). Most people won't use anything like this and it's primary only found in enterprise class bare-metal hypervisors like VMWare ESXi, so it honestly doesn't have any impact on workstations running VMWare Workstation in 99.99% of situations.
From Intel:
"VT-d" stands for "Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O". The relationship between VT and VT-d is that the former is an "umbrella" term referring to all Intel virtualization technologies and the latter is a particular solution within a suite of solutions under this umbrella.
The overall concept behind VT-d is hardware support for isolating and restricting device accesses to the owner of the partition managing the device.
Re:Sales Pitch (Score:4, Informative)
Notice that VT-d is disabled, not VT. VT-d allows a hardware device to be passed directly from the hypervisor to a virtual machine (such as a video card). This is only used in HypverV, Xen, and (I think) VMWare ESX, none of which are desktop products. I use VMWare Workstation and Virtualbox quite often (although I'm warming up to KVM) on both AMD and Intel, with no ill effects from either side. Please be informed about what you're saying Intel is screwing us on, and you'll see that 90% of the people that use these features aren't even effected.
Re:Meh. (Score:5, Informative)
In my experiences, they have always outperformed Intel's processors, and generally cost half as much.
That hasn't been the case for several generations of processor design, unfortunately. The top end of the AMD processor line can't compete with Intel on performance. That's why they've gotten so cheap -- so OEMs build systems on them. The 'Intel Tax' puts a lot of their mid-range and above stuff out of reach of the average consumer, and generally you're only finding them in laptops now because of the superior power usage and thermals...
If you want per-unit performance today, you buy Intel. If you want commodity, you buy AMD.
Lies (Score:5, Informative)
AMD has superior FP capabilities. In both CAD and CAE benchmarks, honors always go to AMD for the math. But what really hit me as a big-ole liar fanboi comment was the one about CAD rendering. The majority of that is not related to your CPU, but your GPU. The portion of GPU that is CPU related still benefits from AMD chips which have the memory at the front end of the chip, compared to the Intel that has the memory pipeline as far back as possible in order to claim "we have more MHz than AMD".
Video compression really depends on who's chip the code has been modified for (if any). As with CAE math, native chip math functions are much faster on AMD.
I run annual benchmarks inside companies for Intel vs. AMD and have for over a decade. These benchmarks show real world performance of Unigraphics, CATIA, HyperMesh, MSC Patran, Ansys, and Muses. CATIA and Ansys are always the worst on AMD, as they have both been assimilated by DirectX over OpenGL with no option to force OpenGL. They still however slightly favor AMD over Intel.
I don't rely on Tom's hardware or someone else for opinion, since Tom's showed us long ago that you can't trust "independent" benchmarks for much. I have read benchmark reports from others that indicate the opposite, but have yet to have anyone recreate their results for me. I use real decks and models from real products, I don't use code exercising a subset of CPU instructions as fast as it possibly can.
Re:Well, you just killed it for me. (Score:4, Informative)
As I've pointed out before in this thread... It was a typo. Funny thing is, 'd' and 'x' are right next to each other on the keyboard, and vt-d is different than vt-x. But whatever... why read comments elsewhere in the thread?
No, they don't (Score:4, Informative)
More cores are useful if, and only if, you have software threaded out enough to use it. Some workloads are, many are not. This "OMG moar cores lol," attitude is silly, and to me reeks of fanboyism. "My chosen holy grail platform does this, therefore everyone should want it!"
Also more cores aren't necessarily useful if things over all are too much slower. For example, you'd expect a T1100 to be faster than a 2600 at x264 encoding. I mean it is all kinds of multi-threaded, and the T1100 has 50% more cores. Maybe the FX-8350 too. While it isn't 6 core, it does have 8 modules so 8 threads.
Well, the reality it that they are not (http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/27). The T1100 and FX-8350 are behind pretty much all modern Intel CPUs. An i5-2400 beats them out. Despite the core advantage, the speed disadvantage per core is too much.
But go ahead and keep telling yourself that you are the only TRUE kind of computer user because you care more about cores than actual performance.