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Main link: Skylake Overclocking: Regular CPU BCLK overclocking is being removed
Intel has, for many years now, disabled overclocking on all but a select few, highly-priced CPUs, by fixing the maximum clock multiplier. (A practice not limited to Intel, as AMD has also done so on some series). The base clock was technically modifiable, but since it drove not just the CPU, but also RAM and PCIe clocks, you were lucky to get even a few megahertz out of it.
With their newest generation of chips, codenamed "Skylake", the PCIe domain is on a separate clock generator. While Intel officially only supported overclocking on their designated CPUs, and only on their highest-end chipset, SuperMicro, ASRock, and several other motherboard vendors produced motherboards using low-end chipsets that allowed base clock overclocking on any processor. Since this could allow extremely cheap systems to be performance-competitive with much higher-cost systems, albeit with higher cooling requirements and greater risk of failure, Intel was obviously upset.
The story is still developing (no parties have yet been willing to talk on the record, least of all Intel), but the latest BIOS update for several ASRock motherboards includes a firmware update and disabling the BCLK overclocking (the two are believed to be connected - the latest firmware prevents BCLK modification). Additionally, all marketing surrounding this unofficial-official overclocking support has been pulled. SuperMicro and other vendors have not yet done so, but unnamed sources are indicating that they will.
While it may be tempting to put the blame solely on Intel, this was clearly not a feature they intended to support, and the motherboard vendors should have been more cautious about making a feature out of bypassing a limitation on the CPUs, regardless of whether it was an artificial limitation or not. That said, I for one hope AMD's next line of CPUs is both fully competitive with Intel, and fully overclockable across the entire range. Maybe that is what is needed to force Intel to compete on price/performance again.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gman003 on Thursday February 11 2016, @03:29AM
On your own device? Sure. Anything you want to do, go ahead and do. I don't care what the lawyers say their license agreement says - the nature of the transaction was a sale, and so as long as they have your money and you have their product, it ought to be yours to do with as you see fit. (The law may not be on this side, but as far as I am concerned, ethics is on mine here). If you want to buy up one of those motherboards now, and flash the old BIOS images onto it, that is (or at least should be) your right as a consumer. (And actually not a bad idea, come to think of it)
However, this feature was added by motherboard manufacturers. For them, the nature of the transaction actually is a license - they pay $X per year or per item to have permission to make these motherboards, using Intel's information and trademarks. They did not reverse-engineer Intel's socket and chipset and firmware - they signed a contract and paid for it. And the terms of that contract, presumably and apparently, included something to the terms of "if you make life hard for Intel, we can take this license away".
Intel's marketing gimmick of making only certain processors overclockable, well, it's not illegal, and it actually has at least a bit of basis in reality (they only mark the highest-binned CPUs as K-series, so even if you could overclock any chip, the ones currently sold as overclockable would clock higher than the others). I'm not going to call it outright wrong. So if Intel wants that to be their policy, well, it is their prerogative to do so. They can't (or at least shouldn't) be allowed to stop you if you find a way to go around it, but if a motherboard "partner" tries to bypass it as a way to drum up their own sales, that's a different story.
Because a license is an ongoing thing that can be broken, Intel could just threaten SuperMicro et al. with revoking their license if they didn't comply. Being unable to compete further in the motherboard market is not worth marginally increased sales for the current models, so of course they acquiesced.
My point in the summary was that that whole sequence of events was predictable for them. SuperMicro couldn't possibly have thought that Intel would just let it slide. Maybe they really were willing to go through all that trouble just to get extra sales for a few months. Maybe they somehow thought it was a deliberate feature. Maybe they just have really bad lawyers.
Honestly, with that line I was mainly just trying to prevent the comments from devolving into AMD fanboys bashing Intel. But since the only dumb comments were instead Intel fanboys bashing AMD, that may not have been necessary.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday February 11 2016, @11:53AM
Though I may not like it, I do see and acknowledge your point. Thanks for pointing this out.