This isn’t exactly news and has been brewing over the past few months, with Intel mostly keeping quite, but has hit the headlines hard in the past few days as more data comes in confirming a very high percentage (potentially 100%) failure rate of 13th and 14th Gen CPUs.
For those of you that prefer video format to reading, Gamers Nexus covers all the major points of this ongoing topic in this video released two days ago:
Intel has so far tried to deflect the blame to motherboard manufacturers running CPUs on higher voltage than needed, however data now confirms that the issue is present on CPUs used in servers that are running way lower voltages and limits as these configurations prioritize stability,
The problem seems to affect CPUs of B0 stepping across iterations of i9, i7 and i5.
A couple of days ago Intel came out with a statement claiming laptop CPUs are not affected, however not even two days later Intel has commented that the laptop CPUs of these two generations are seeing similar issues.
According to Intel, laptop CPUs exhibiting these issues do not appear to share the same cause as the desktop versions.
They say they have found the issue and will be pushing a microcode update in mid-August to solve this. Either way, this isn’t a good look, especially since AMD seems to have some pretty decent CPUs ready.
I tend to only upgrade the core hardware “every solar eclipse”, but I already decided that there’s no way I’m getting an Intel CPU for when I feel like getting a new one. Intel might have slightly higher performance in comparison to AMD, but it’s at the cost of much higher power usage, temperatures and now this.
A CPU must be reliable out of the box, and not after some patches glued to it. Even then, patches can’t fix oxidation if it’s true it happens. Even if there is no oxidation and all problems could be fixed with microcode updates, these CPUs will forever be unreliable. Any specs or benchmarks will never reflect the real world, because you have to underclock, undervolt or apply microcode patches or BIOS/UEFI updates.
I see no reason to get an Intel CPU when I can get an AMD CPU 1 or 2 years after the generation i want releases (lowering prices significantly).
I’m very sceptical of this being a “simple” microcode issue, which took a year to figure out and fix.
Oxidation issue has been confirmed by Intel in a post one of the company employees made on reddit.
No mention of this oxidation issue on the main post on their community forum. They seem to have spread the info over multiple channels as much as possible.
They have also known about this issue since 2023, but have not mentioned this information public, just hoped nobody catches on it seems.
There are some theories that they are intentionally delaying the “fix” in order to avoid new line of AMD processors beating them in benchmarks.
If you’re using a 13th- or 14th-generation CPU and you’re not noticing any problems, the microcode update should prevent your processor from degrading. But if you’re already noticing stability problems, Tom’s Hardware reports that “the bug causes irreversible degradation of the impacted processors” and that the fix will not be able to reverse the damage that has already happened.
I’ve been researching this for the last couple of days and have not seen a definitive list of the affected CPUs. Some mention the high-end ones are most likely to be affected, but they don’t completely rule out any others. My 13th Gen Intel Core i5-13400F hasn’t been specifically mentioned, so I’m hoping that I got a pass.
So far, I’m only seeing crashes with one particular program - Path of Exile on Windows 11 - but that didn’t start until a bug-riddled hotfix was released last week.
Very interesting how this happens during Intel’s latest screw-up. IIRC, there is a review that escaped, but it only tested gaming performance against their flagship X3D Ryzen 7000 series and the results were kind of expected: the X3D chips are marginally better in gaming.
Unfortunately, as these things go in the corporate world, the ones to pay the price for the stock crash are going to be lower level employees as Intel has announced a massive layoff.
Sadly this is true and it absolutely sucks! But, realistically, there is only one way to fall… down.
Sure the employees are the ones to hurt first, but they don’t appear to be the only ones in this case (which is very telling for how big a hole intel dug themselves into this time). They have suspended stock dividends, and the timing of reports of them canceling expansion investments in Italy and France over the summer are a bit sus…
Hoping that Intel will fulfill all RMA requests for messed up CPUs. I can’t lie when I say that this issue has so many bits of information and so many perspective, it is a bit much for me.
This is extremely hopeful…
I legitimately think just settling a class action lawsuit will be way cheaper for Intel than RMA every single CPU, which is why I think that’s the way they’ll go sooner or later (I believe one is already under way).
