According to the stuff seen at the IDF, Ivy Bridge CPUs decouple the main clock finally, following what the coming Sandy Bridge - E Socket 2011 is also implementing. Now, you can overclock the cores and memory without worrying about affecting the I/O and PCIe clocks. But then comes the more interesting piece news.
A year later, in early 2013, the pinnacle of Intel's 22 nm process show off, the initial Haswell processor, is expected to go another step further, where CPU core, GPU, memory, PCI and DMI ratios are all set independently here, on top of fine grain BCLK base clock available within the Lynx Point chipset. Also, due to its fully integrated voltage regulator circuitry for simplified platform design, more stable power delivery and therefore more predictable overclocking could be achieved. Add to it the expected major improvements in memory DIMM layout topology, enabling great performance even with 2 DIMMs per channel without the usual penalties compared to just 1 DIMM per channel.
Now, this would be as far as one can go in overclock friendliness on a mainstream platform, and, knowing that the sources were confirming the likelihood of combined multiple CPU and multiple GPU cores on Haswell (i.e. you could have, say, 4 CPU cores and 2 GPU cores, or 2 CPU cores and 3 GPU cores chip), would create possibly the most flexible desktop - and mobile - platform Intel, or anyone else, ever had in one socket.
