The thing is rumors are saying Haswell will have very flexible overclocking options, and Ivy Bridge is already looking better in that area than Sandy Bridge. It's hard to see then that it will be limited by VRM. I can't see why they would purposely limit it, and if they do, revise hearing from motherboard manufacturers.
For most people, it wouldn't be the limiting factor. The proportion of people who run their cpus at 300W is rather low.
Which is why I was suggesting certain high end motherboards might still have the regular VRM addition to handle the higher power. And power usage isn't a problem with those folks of course.
The problem is, this would require the cpu chips to be radically different. If they are not putting any low voltage pathways into the cpus, then the MB cannot supply low voltages, no matter how you design it.
Well... would it be hugely positive enough to make stock speeds better then what an OC would have been without it?
Probably not. While it would increase the headroom of the chip some (because less power spent while distributing power = more power spent by the chips themselves), the biggest gains would be in the lower end.
This sort of reminds me of 2 years ago before SB was released. Everyone was saying how Intel was killing OCing by removing the BCLK from SB1155. Here we are talking about Haswell in the same manner due to iVRM. I have faith that Intel is not going to kill OCing as some may fear.
They did shift OC into the most expensive cpus of the line. A lot of people used to get the cheapest cpu with all cores/cache enabled, and oc that past the stock best cpu. You cannot do that anymore -- now you have to buy the more expensive OC-enabled gear.
This would only be an extension of that policy. I fully expect that the S1150 platform will have awesome OC features for "reasonable" overclocks, but no way of raising the voltage above ~30% of stock. While the actual overclocking will be limited to the high-end sockets. (which have beefier VRM for better stability in server loads.)
I would put my money on the iVRM only being on laptop/ultrabook CPUs (SOC).
Servers would love the power savings, which means it will be found from the high-end desktop socket too. At that point, why would you design the desktop cpu differently?