More news on Ivybridge

The upcoming 22nm Ivy Bridge processors appear to have been tweaked slightly with regards to the FSB. The current generation of 1155 processors have very tight FSBs meaning overclocking is pretty much entirely limited to multiplier alterations. The Ivy Bridge processors will apparently have a little more flexibility when it comes to changing the FSB, a margin of + or – 5% is said to be realistic.

So users of the Ivy Bridge platform can switch their FSB between 95MHz, 100MHz (default) and 105MHz which should allow better flexibility with overclocking, although long gone are the days of the Pentiums with a wide variety of FSB speeds such as 66, 84 and 100MHz.

Many are saying that this may still not be enough to please most overclockers since if the processor is not a “K” processor then an extra 5MHz on the FSB will probably only provide an overclock of about 150-200MHz depending on the stock multiplier of Ivy Bridge processors. For example if the base multiplier of the processor is 35 x 100 on a non-k processor you could increase your FSB to 105MHz and end up with an overclock from 3.5GHz to 3.675GHz.

There is also talk that the Ivy Bridge processors will have native support for 2133MHz DDR3 memory modules with potential support for modules up to a very fast 3000MHz on DDR3 which will probably be the fastest DDR3 gets before the next generation DDR4 memory is introduced. Currently Sandy Bridge only has “native support” for 1333MHz but it can support higher memory speeds.