<story><title>Intel to shut down renegade Skylake overclocking with microcode update</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/02/intel-to-shut-down-renegade-skylake-overclocking-with-microcode-update/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>xlayn</author><text>There are two things for this situation&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  -On one hand Intel is disabling a &amp;quot;Feature&amp;quot; of their cpus
   as a way of preventing users to get &amp;quot;More expensive 
   performance&amp;quot; without paying for it; you can think of it
   like intel is just covering their back; we can assume the
   difference on their cpus is just related to binning [0]
   and they are just protecting their customers by not 
   allowing less performant cpus perform better therefore 
   increasing reliability.
  -on the other hand you can see how hardware is not
   anymore something you buy and expect to behave in a
   certain way.
   For those paranoid... would this mean they can also alter
   how instructions behave? **cough**security**cough**
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Product_binning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Product_binning&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Intel to shut down renegade Skylake overclocking with microcode update</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/02/intel-to-shut-down-renegade-skylake-overclocking-with-microcode-update/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>roddux</author><text>What possible reason could they have for this, apart from forcing users to buy their &amp;#x27;unlocked&amp;#x27; chips? Is it really worth the nightmarish PR debacle they will undoubtedly face?&lt;p&gt;Side note (from comments) -- apparently Intel paired this microcode update with a patch to fix CPUs freezing during Prime95. Not cool.</text></comment>