Taipei (Taiwan) - Hot on the heels of AMD’s overclocking secret, we can reveal that Bloomfield and Lynnfield, key processors of Intel’s upcoming Nehalem family, will indeed feature overclocking capabilities for up to 16 CPU cores.
Credible information we were able to obtain from industry sources suggest that rumors about Intel preventing users from overclocking Nehalem processors are false. From what we have learned, Intel has very healthy silicon on its hands. It appears that there are some challenges related to overclocking, especially in the memory controller area. However, it is unlikely that there will be anything that prevents overclocking of the CPU cores.
Core 3, or whatever Intel decides to call the desktop Nehalem CPU, will be available as an Extreme Edition variant again, which is ready to elevate the performance bar. At the very high-end, Intel is developing the successor of its super-expensive V8 Skulltrail platform. This time around, your Windows Task Manager will see 16 cores and not just eight.
Bloomfield is Intel’s high-end part, featuring a 192-bit DDR3-1333 and DDR2-1600 memory controller. DDR3-1600 support is still unofficial at this point, since Intel is waiting for JEDEC ratification. Lynnfield is the mainstream desktop part, which will feature a more conventional 128-bit memory controller.
Time will tell what Intel’s Bloomfield overclocking potential really is. It will be interesting to see what Fugger, Coolaler, Kinc, Shamino (apologies to the ones I forgot to mention here, but we can’t keep track of all those nicks) and the rest of OC community can do when Bloomfield gets frozen to -100 degrees Celsius. We will try to find out is final silicon immune to the infamous "cold bug" or not.
When Nehalem comes to life, you can expect that our usual suspects will have overclocking motherboards ready — and Intel will have overclockable CPUs.
