Intel plans to deliberately limit Sandy Bridge overclocking

[Drwho?]

Are there even "classic" steppings with SB, cause with SB we should get upgradeable firmware? I still wonder what capabilities this FW has, and how much you can influence the CPU with it.

well, this is not firmware, this is the regular systems, but it is much more advanced now that things are getting integrated. Especially on the power management side, you don t want laptop parts and desktop parts to behave the same. Nothing new, just more nodes to adapt to where stuff go. If you look at the literrature about Nehalem, it is already in. Thinking that the receipe to optimize all of this is in those leaked sample is funny. What would mean that Intel People are so good that we don t need the silicon to tune the CPU ... lol I wish! But sorry very much like you and me, Human!

Let's take an example, turning OFF the top of the 64 to 128bits of an SSE execution can save 50% of the power, in the mean time, turning it back on is not instantanious ... so, for a workstation, you don t want that feature ON, while, on a laptop , you really want this ... Now, if you go through the all design of a core like Nehalem, you ll find many places where you can enable those kind of power saving. you want to turn off your cores when you see only single threaded workloads, etc ... all of those policies need to be tuned.
The new generation of CPUs are not what people are use to, there are reason why the Core i3/i5 have those amazing level of performance with the same power envellope as Penryn ...
Power gating is very powerfull if you take the time to do it very deep everywhere and you have a power control unit smart enough to do it right.

Those new processor architectures are really amazing, provide awesome flexibility, with billion like transistor count.
Intel Rarely speak about it, but we do have performance counters all over the CPU, monitoring all the phenomena inside the machine, and vTune allow you to get access and see the statistics about all of this. If you are really into performance and CPU architecture, there are documentation and free version of vTune. help yourselfs, and look at all those nodes that can be monitored. The CPUs are not 486 or Pentium like for a long time, NEhalem toke it to a much higher level, and this was only the 1st step.

Francois

PS: by the way, i just posted this using Wimax enable Core i7 620M, and I am in the middle of the silicon valley, Indoor , using WIMAX-4G

This is the way to go ==> http://www.clear.com/