Intel breaks silence on 13th and 14th-gen Raptor Lake desktop CPU instability issues

floofloof@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.world – 178 points –
notebookcheck.net
33

"Gamers Nexus, on the other hand, thinks the issue is more deep rooted and originates from a foundry-level fault."

  • The GN piece makes it very clear that this claim is not definitely true but is a line of inquiry.
  • Intel statement does not definitely exclude this hypothesis, the flawed CPU might need the lower voltage to work around the flaw.
  • The obvious question this article does not address is what will be the performance hit for the patched parts?

That's a bit annoying to see GN so grossly misquoted when Steve spends half the run time of the video explaining that they are not sure of anything at this point.

Intel confirmed on reddit that oxidation did impact some chips.

More than one thing can be wrong at the same time, so everybody can be right!

They admitted that there was an oxidation defect and they haven't started a recall or even listed serial numbers?

It's a lot cheaper to say "if you think you're affected contact us" than it is to proactively reach out with a recall.

It's also a lot easier to scam people by keeping them in the dark and denying them RMAs until their warranty runs out after you sold them a broken product. The whole thing smells like stalling until after the AMD launch next week.

Steve does go on, and on, and on, and on... Quite challenging, if you have a tight deadline.

He's just really thorough. They have a text-based website too if you prefer that format for reviews, but they don't always have time to make text articles of their investigative pieces and news reports.

https://gamersnexus.net/

For most of their videos you can just play it in the background.

But that said, why are you watching any youtube videos if you have a "tight deadline"?

"We're going to undervolt them. You're stuck with the damage done, and you won't have luck overclocking or getting as much performance from our chips."

Not only that, but I don't think stability issues like this would've been known around or shortly after launch, so Intel (likely unknowingly) got to mislead consumers and reviewers into thinking that their 13th/14th HEDT processors were close to competitive with AMD's, when they were anything but. It's never been more apparent how stagnant Intel truly has become, and that's already been a trope for years.

Nice one Intel. My next computer certainly will not contain an Intel CPU.

I wish someone would start making desktop motherboards with socketed RISC-V and ARM CPUs.

risc v wouldn't be worth much right now but snapdragon I could see getting socketed at some point.

That would be great for a server, but 1.7GHz is a bit slow for a desktop.

Up to 128 cores. Not meant for gaming, but it cranks at server tasks, compiling & coding tasks, etc.

There’s a windows dev kit (ARM) that I think is 3ghz: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-dev-kit-2023

But bleeding edge stuff from MS means likely driver issues, and this isn’t something you’ll throw a dedicated graphics card in.

Still, feels like the tide is changing away from Intel. I too was looking at “ARM for Desktop” options a couple weeks back.

I have a 96 core one. While it'll be fine as a desktop for compiling I'd stick with an AMD system.

The devkit has 6 memory channels, and you'll want to fill them all - there's a surprisingly high performance penalty if you don't. Even then, compiling a code base which could be spread over hundreds of cores is still significantly slower on the ampere compared to my old 3970x.

My first thought went to the Milk-V Pioneer since it has mATX form factor, but both products are priced way higher than your average desktop.

https://milkv.io/pioneer

not to mention its a dev kit. at this point not everything will run\be problem free.

AMD stock should have gone through the roof on this news.

Fyi. AMD has gone down 13% this week. Intel went up today.

No clue why. AMD is killing it right now, and they're just slaughtering Intel's positions in the market for the next number of years.

I think insiders already knew about this problem. It would explain why the stock has been dropping over the past few months.

This is actually good for Intel, if they think that they can actually fix the problem in microcode.

They can keep the problem from starting, but any processors that are already impacted need to be RMA'd

This doesn't seem like the whole story, and it's awfully convenient that everything will be fixed AFTER the AMD launch next week, when they've known about this issue for over a year.

Alderon Games is accusing Intel of running damage control here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/1e9mf04/comment/leg5umu/

It's not the whole story. After Intel's press release about voltage issues and an upcoming microcode patch, they quietly snuck out an admission that there is an oxidization problem after all. It smells like they're trying to downplay that and avoid having to replace their faulty CPUs.

https://youtu.be/OVdmK1UGzGs?si=P4QfyLmAW3dUJ7nE

Level1Tech looked a good amount into it and he's not convinced microcode updates, which they have released many, will fix the issue.

They won't, since Intel has quietly admitted now that there is an oxidization issue too. Microcode can't fix that, and if it can work around it, it will do so at a significant performance cost.