Intel plans to deliberately limit Sandy Bridge overclocking

[Drwho?]

Francois:
This isn't just to you but to all companies.
ALL of you want to hide the numbers till the day the parts release.
I think your all wrong in your thinking.
IF it's a great part then shout it to the world.
Show it,tout it,say to the world: "Beat this you suns a biatches"
Oh, did I say I'm a sort of in your face type of guy?

Intel is a very open company, when we include new improvements, we always take time to explain to external experts like the excellent David Kanter how we archived those speed and cool tricks. If we do that too early, it actually allow our competitors to catch up faster, decreasing the return on investment of our Research and Dev ... This can actually cause you to sell your fabs if you keep doing it ...
Fortunatly, the business guys at Intel know all of this, In French , we say "You don t teach a old Monkey for to make grins ..."
It is important to do not get your competitor guessing your next moves, while it is important to intel to be predictable for its partners and people working with our hardware and developping for the PC ...
I am not involve into those decisions, but I understand the smartness behind it, and I get trained every year to respect the law, and do it the right way.

I just hope that explaining this to you guys does not bore you, I hope it is interesting to you to understand what we do. (Not because we don t like you, we just protect our R&D investments , being copied too early cost $)

DrWho?
(My personal view on the thing)

[K404]

Plus.... if we know how awesome the next stuff is gonna be and its not too far away... we might just not bother buying that 980x tomorrow... just wait and save our cash.

ALTHOUGH..... the newer stuff will always be better

[informal]

DrWho, just a simple question: If a random Chinese guy in Taiwan can get a sample of SB and run various tests and post the results online,what do you think are the chances the competitors performance labs haven't done the same thing,even earlier ? Even if the SB samples are, as you say "untuned" ,the guys over at your competitors labs are smart enough to project the correct performance data fairly accurately. Same goes for the "other way around case"(your guys getting competitor's samples).
All in all,NDAs are there for a reason,but this late into the development process of both SB and Bulldozer, no 3rd party leak can change much(like the Chinese guy's results can't change what AMD can do with their next gen parts).
We are grateful though for your postings,even though you can't say much due the NDA constraints.

[josh1980]

Perhaps Intel is so confident in their product's performance they feel that their SB at stock voltage will outperform AMD products even when overclocked?

[Drwho?]

Perhaps Intel is so confident in their product's performance they feel that their SB at stock voltage will outperform AMD products even when overclocked?

Core i7 does already on many benchmarks ...

[Chumbucket843]

I just countered your "greatly increased die area" comment with an actual hard data.I didn't say I believe it's double pumped,it's just a possibility.AVX/SSE part is the top left rectangular part of the core.

i said considerable (!great) and 10-15% is so. my measurements match up fairy well with hans' for all but SB. with smaller and smaller cores it becomes harder to measure accurately. i suggest you try and see what you get.

[informal]

It's actually 7% increase in core size(excl. L2), if you want to nitpick . And general consensus is that this is not nearly enough for monolithic 256bit hardware.But intel has the smartest guys in the design teams,so there must be something new and innovative they did with SB's SSE units.

[hecktic]

Im sure someone will figure out a way to do a physical mod on the chips now to unlock some level of OC

[Drwho?]

DrWho, just a simple question: If a random Chinese guy in Taiwan can get a sample of SB and run various tests and post the results online,what do you think are the chances the competitors performance labs haven't done the same thing,even earlier ? Even if the SB samples are, as you say "untuned" ,the guys over at your competitors labs are smart enough to project the correct performance data fairly accurately. Same goes for the "other way around case"(your guys getting competitor's samples).
All in all,NDAs are there for a reason,but this late into the development process of both SB and Bulldozer, no 3rd party leak can change much(like the Chinese guy's results can't change what AMD can do with their next gen parts).
We are grateful though for your postings,even though you can't say much due the NDA constraints.

One important parameter of the integration happening, with the GPU getting into the CPUs (as Core i3/i5 already) is that the buses and all the programmability included in those new generation processors can impact dramatically the performance and power usage. The Taiwan or Chinese guy running the SB does not have the receipe, and those part can behave very far from what the final product will do, a wrong code in the power control unit can change your performance by massive factors, latencies can change, bandwitch can be limited by not well programmed power saving features.
Policies between sub systems can be conflicting ... This is a very hard work to do it right, and the tool required to figure out those thing are not available yet outside ...
So, don't trust what you see online, it can be optimistic or pesimistic, time will tell you, but not me ....

[Hans de Vries]

This is incorrect assemptions. Can't say more, but this is pure speculation in the wrong direction, Sorry for the bad news. (The size of the cache and the GPU cache needs are not related, good imagination by the way ;-) )
(The other questions answers are under NDA ... sorry)
The good new is that the title of this thread is totally silly and wrong too

This thread was just a Big piece of
Francois

Hi, François,

I have no problem in believing you that the title of this thread,
(which is the title of the article it refers to) is crap and fud.

For the other part, the architectural features of Sandy Bridge,
there is an ancient saying in Dutch which goes as follows:

"An old grinning Monkey does not need to have signed an NDA
to see some things from a mile away...."

So for those who ask me I'll say:

1) The L3 cache located next to each core is 2MB.
2) The AVX unit of Sandy Bridge is two fold hiper-pipelined.

(It handles 256 bit SIMD words with 128 bit hardware by
inserting the second 128 bit data into the pipeline after
half a cycle after the intermediate results of the first half
are stored in the halfway registers)


Regards,


But I respect that your position on this is like:

[Drwho?]

But I respect that your position on this is like:

more like

[Hornet331]

oh please... come one you guys are both in +35years old and you still act like kids?

[NaeKuh]

LOL this thread is funny.

And Dr. Who, lets assume you can overclock SB.

It will lose hard against a SR-2 platform with 2 X5680's.

So your wrong... it wont destory everything out there.

And im willing to bet current westmere-ep's will be very close to it.

[informal]

I think they are joking around .
Hans' speculation seems reasonable so far,let's see what next IDF brings us.

[Tomasis]

Well, The AMD bullDozer architect wishes that I answer you (Poker Face), this time, it is like conroe, to figure out the real performance of SB, you will have to wait very close to launch, most of what is out there is not having the right tuning, and I really like it this way.

After all, competition is like a Poker game ... playing with all the card on the table never worked ...


You can decide to believe AMD about SandyB ... but you would not use the most realable experts about 32nm ... outch .. sorry, could not resist

Just friendly jokes, ok ... ?

it means intels competitive advantage is lower nm like ati did with nvidia, huh?

it will be exciting to see the battle of Fabs, not designers

[Manicdan]

oh please... come one you guys are both in +35years old and you still act like kids?

if you dont act like a kid, you die of old age

[El Mano]

Research and Dev ... This can actually cause you to sell your fabs if you keep doing it ...

Oh man that was so cruel mwaha ha

[Johnny87au]

Sandybridge -DT= 4core /8 threads, LGA 1155 3.0ghz clock speed 3.8 turbo , TDP 65-95W all i can really find, Bet you guys didnt know after ivry bridge their bringing out haswell and rockwell which are 16 nm

[Drwho?]

LOL this thread is funny.

And Dr. Who, lets assume you can overclock SB.

It will lose hard against a SR-2 platform with 2 X5680's.

So your wrong... it wont destory everything out there.

And im willing to bet current westmere-ep's will be very close to it.

Well, sandy bridge generation will have dual CPU too , what was your point?

[Iconyu]

LOL this thread is funny.

And Dr. Who, lets assume you can overclock SB.

It will lose hard against a SR-2 platform with 2 X5680's.

So your wrong... it wont destory everything out there.

And im willing to bet current westmere-ep's will be very close to it.

You do know who Dr Who is right? When he talks about Intel he uses the word 'we' and that not just because he's french.

Edit: Actually it might be hard to tell, because he's a little excitable, but I guess it's the first time he's been 'forced' to dampen a rumour that incorrect about this new architecture. He's easily as excited about this as he was when he explained to everyone that the 1366 i7's would overclock fine if was just different and that everyone would enjoy it.

[god_43]

ok ppl when ever you see a thread by me, and you dont like the title....blame the article. i never change the titles, i believe it is more journalistic to leave them as is (no matter how flaming them are). so stop attacking me ok?

[mAJORD]

oh please... come one you guys are both in +35years old and you still act like kids?

5 yrs till I have to grow up

[ajaidev]

I want to say so much on this thread things like no, multiplier, voltage, ratio, bios among other things but cant...

[Dainas]

I guess the similar rumors where floating when Nehalem was about to be released, so lets see something more concrete before worrying.......

considering what 1156 was for overclocking, 1155 will only be worse. Thats the cost of throwing everything and the kitchen sink onto the cpu package.

[Sn0wm@n]

I want to say so much on this thread things like no, multiplier, voltage, ratio, bios among other things but cant...

is it a subliminal message that you have an ES sample???