There is no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs — any damage is permanent

Same here. I hate Intel so much, I won't even work there, despite it being my current industry and having been headhunted by their recruiter. It was so satisfying to tell them to go pound sand.

I've been on AMD and ATi since the Athlon 64 days on the desktop.

Laptops are always Intel, simply because that's what I can find, even if every time I scour the market extensively.

Sorry but after the amazing Athlon x2, the core and core 2 (then i series) lines fuckin wrecked AMD for YEARS. Ryzen took the belt back but AMD was absolutely wrecked through the core and i series.

Source: computer building company and also history

tl:dr: AMD sucked ass for value and performance between core 2 and Ryzen, then became amazing again after Ryzen was released.

I've had nothing but issues with some computers, laptops, etc... once I discovered the common factor was Intel, I haven't had a single problem with any of my devices since. AMD all the way for CPUs.

I'm with you on all this. Fuck Intel.

I hate the way Intel is going, but I've been using Intel chips for over 30 years and never had an issue.

So your statement is kind of pointless, since it's such a small data set, it's irrelevant and nothing to draw any conclusion from.

(c) upgradability and not having motherboards be disposable on purpose

Genuinely, I've also been an AMD buyer since I started building 12 years ago. I started out as a fan boy but mellowed out over the years. I know the old FX were garbage but it's what I started on, and I genuinely enjoy the 4 gens of Intel since ivy bridge, but between the affordability and being able to upgrade without changing the motherboard every generation, I've just been using Ryzen all these years.

arm is very primed to take a lot of market share of server market from intel. Amazon is already very committed on making their graviton arm cpu their main cpu, which they own a huge lion share of the server market on alone.

for consumers, arm adoption is fully reliant on the respective operating systems and compatibility to get ironed out.

RISC-V isn't there yet, but it's moving in the right direction. A completely open architecture is something many of us have wanted for ages. It's worth keeping an eye on.

If there were decent homelab ARM CPUs, I'd be all over that. But everything is either memory limited (e.g. max 8GB) or datacenter grade (so $$$$). I want something like a Snapdragon with 4x SATA, 2x m.2, 2+ USB-C, and support for 16GB+ RAM in a mini-ITX form factor. Give it to me for $200-400, and I'll buy it if it can beat my current NAS in power efficiency (not hard, it's a Ryzen 1700).

It's not quite there for desktop use yet, but it probably won't be too much longer.

hmm. not really. I can't beat AMD. Only in power-consumption, sure, but not in real performance.

For real?

Not really

You mean the type where the lawyers get eight figure payouts and you get a ten dollar check?

Yet they do it all the time when a higher specs CPU is fabricated with physical defects and is then presented as a lower specs variant.

So here's the thing about that, the real performance I lose is... not negligible, but somewhere between 0 and 10% in most scenarios, and I went pretty hard keeping the power limits low. Once I set it up this way, realizing just how much power and heat I'm saving for the last few few drops of performance made me angrier than having to do this. The dumb performance race with all the built-in overclocking has led to these insanely power hungry parts that are super sensitive to small defects and require super aggressive cooling solutions.

I would have been fine with a part rated for 150W instead of 250 that worked fine with an air cooler. I could have chosen whether to push it. But instead here we are, with extremely expensive motherboards massaging those electrons into a firehose automatically and turning my computer into a space heater for the sake of bragging about shaving half a milisecond per frame on CounterStrike. It's absurd.

None of which changes that I got sold a bum part, Intel is fairly obviously trying to weasel out of the obviously needed recall and warranty extension and I'm suddenly on the hook for close to a grand in superfluous hardware next time I want to upgrade because my futureproof parts are apparently made of rust and happy thoughts.

If you're in the UK or I expect EU, I imagine if it's due to oxidation you can get it replaced even on an expired warranty as it's a defect which was known to either you or intel before the warranty expired, and a manufacturing defect rather than breaking from use, so intel are pretty much in a corner about having sold you faulty shit

The article is... not wrong, but oversimplifying. There seem to be multiple faults at play here, some would continue to degrade, others would prevent you from recovering some performance threshold, but may be prevented from further damage, others may be solved. Yes, degradation of the chip may be irreversible, if it's due to the oxidation problem or due to the incorrect voltages having cuased damage, but presumably in some cases the chip would continue to work stable and not degenerate further with the microcode fixes.

But yes, agreed, the situation sucks and Intel should be out there disclosing a range of affected chips by at least the confirmed physical defect and allowing a streamlined recall of affected devices, not saying "start an RMA process and we'll look into it".

Replacing it with what exactly. Another 13/14th gen chip?

"Clearly damaged" is an interesting problem. The CPU would crash 100% of the time on the default settings for the motherboard, but if you remember, they issued a patch already.

I patched. And guess what, with the new Intel Defaults it doesn't crash anymore. But it suddenly runs very hot instead. Like, weird hot. On a liquid cooling system it's thermal throttling when before it wouldn't come even close. Won't crash, though.

So is it human error? Did I incorrectly mount my cooling? I'd say probably not, considering it ran cool enough pre-patch until it became unstable and it runs cool enough now with a manual downclock. But is that enough for Intel to issue a replacement if the system isn't unstable? More importantly, do I want to have that fight with them now or to wait and see if their upcoming patch, which allegedly will fix whatever incorrect voltage requests the CPU is making, fixes the overheating issue? Because I work on this thing, I can't just chuck it in a box, send it to Intel and wait. I need to be up and running immediately.

So yeah, it sucks either way, but it would suck a lot less if Intel was willing to flag a range of CPUs as being eligible for a recall.

As I see it right now, the order of operations is to wait for the upcoming patch, retest the default settings after the patch and if the behavior seems incorrect contact Intel for a replacement. I just wish they would make it clearer what that process is going to be and who is eligible for one.

Whoa, that's even worse. It's not just the uncertainty of knowing whether Intel will replace your hardware or the cost of jumping ship next time. Intel straight up owes you money. That sucks.

Are there like no consumer guarantees in the US? How is this not a open and shut case where the manufacturer needs to replace or refund the product?

It's just nearly $600. Practically free.

I'm not really that knowledgeable about AM5 mobos (still on AM4) but you should be able to get something perfectly sensible for 100 bucks. Are you going to get as much IO and bells and whistles no but most people don't need that stuff and you don't have to spend a lot of money to get a good VRM or traces to the DIMM slots.

Then, possibly bad news: Intel Gen 13 supports DDR4, so you might need new RAM.

I mean, happy for you, but in the real world a 200 extra dollars for a 400 dollar part is a huge price spike.

Never mind that, be happy for me, I actually went for a higher spec than that when I got this PC because I figured I'd get at least one CPU upgrade out of this motherboard, since it was early days of DDR5 and it seemed like I'd be able to both buy faster RAM and a faster CPU to keep my device up to date. So yeah, it was more expensive than that.

And hey, caveat emptor, futureproofing is a risky, expensive game on PCs. I was ready for a new technology to make me upgrade anyway, if we suddenly figured out endless storage or instant RAM or whatever. Doesn't mean it isn't crappy to suddenly make upgrading my CPU almost twice as expensive because Intel sucks at their one job.

Thanks, Crowdstrike.

I think I went 12th Gen for my brothers computer

12th gen isn't affected. The problem affects only the 13th and 14th gen Intel chips. If your brother has 12th gen -- and you might want to confirm that -- he's okay.

For the high-end thing, initially it was speculated that it was just the high-end chips in these generations, but it's definitely the case that chips other than just the high-end ones have been recorded failing. It may be that the problem is worse with the high-end CPUs, but it's known to not be restricted to them at this point.

The bar they list in the article here is 13th and 14th gen Intel desktop CPUs over 65W TDP.

damn... can you provide more context.

watch end up like nation wide broadband lol

never built and patchy bullshit we did get we get price gouged and dissed by comcast and co

Surely this will never backfire on taxpayers.

1 DOA CPU that the physical store I went to purchase it at didn't have any more of so I got a cheaper Intel CPU they DID have. Tbh that might have been the store dropping it or storing it improperly, they weren't a very competent electronics store.

And a Sapphire GPU that only worked with 1 very specific driver version that wasn't even on their website anymore when I tried to install it for some reason. I eventually got it working after hours of hunting and fiddling, which was repeated when I gave the PC away to a friend's little brother and they wiped it without checking the driver versions I left behind like I told them.

Recently built my wife a new AMD based system because grudges have to end eventually and I think I couldn't have picked a better time tbh

Who buys a thread ripper when the 7800x3d exists?

Heat management is what separates the casuals from the enthusiasts.

That’s not true. It was just last year that some of the Ryzen 7000 models were burning themselves

I think he was referring to "back-in-the-day" when Athlons, unlike the competing Pentium 3 and 4 CPUs of the day, didn't have any thermal protections and would literally go up in smoke if you ran them without cooling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRn8ri9tKf8

Yeah. I just meant AMD cpus used to easily overheat if your cooling system had an issue. My ryzen 7 3700x has been freaking awesome though. Feels more solid than any PC I've built. And it's fast AF. I think I saved over $150 when comparing to a similarly rated Intel CPU. And the motherboards generally seem cheaper for AMD too. I would feel ripped off with Intel even without the crashing issues

Problem is that it's getting extremely hard to get more single-threaded performance out of a chip, and this is one of the few ways to do so. And a lot of software is not going to be rewritten to use multiple cores. In some cases, it's fundamentally impossible to parallelize a particular algorithm.

That was asus applying too much voltage to the x3d skus

My i5-4690 and i7-4770 machines remain competitive to this day, even with spectre patches in place. I saw no reason to 'upgrade' to 6/7/8th gen CPUs.

I'm looking for a new desktop now, but for the costs involved I might just end up parting together a HP Z6 G4 with server surplus cpu/ram. The costs of going to 11th+ desktop Intel don't seem worth it.

I'm going to look at the more recent AMD offerings, but I'm not sure they'll compete with surplus server kit.

Yeah. I never said they were always better in performance. But I have never had an issue other than the heat problem which all but one time was fully my fault. And I don't need a processor to perform 3% better on random tasks... which was the kind of benchmark results I would typically find when comparing similar AMD/intel processors (also in some categories amd did win). I saved probably a couple grand avoiding Intel. And as another user said, I prefer to support the underdog. The company making a great product for a lot less money. Again I say: fuck Intel.

Small correction: only surviving that makes desktop/server class chips. Companies like Texas Instruments and Microchip still have US foundries for microcontrollers.

Should be this vid: https://youtu.be/uY_jeaxVgIE

AMD keeps some older generations in production as their budget options - and as they had excellent CPUs for multiple generations now you also get pretty good computers out of that. Even better - with some planning you'll be able to upgrade to another CPU later when checking chipset lifecycle.

AMD has established by now that they deliver what they promise - and intel couldn't compete with them for a few generations over pretty much the complete product line - so they can afford now to have the bleeding edge hardware at higher prices. It's still far away from what intel was charging when they were dominant 10 years ago - and if you need that performance for work well worth the money. For most private systems I'd always recommend getting last gen, though.

Why does that graph show Epyc (server) and Threadripper (workstation) processors in the upper right corner, but not the equivalent Xeons? If you take those away, it would paint a different picture.

Also, a price/performance graph does not say much about which is the superior technology. Intel has been struggling to keep up with AMD technologically the past years, and has been upping power targets and thermal limits to do so ... which is one of the reasons why we are here points at headline.

I do hope they get their act together, because we an AMD monopoly would just be as bad as an Intel monopoly. We need the competition, and a healthy x86 market, lest proprietary ARM based computers take over the market (Apple M-chips, Snapdragon laptops,...)

I don't see data backing up your claim […]

Links a list where the three top spots substantiate the claim, followed by a comparatively large 8% drop.

To add a bit of nuance: There are definitely exceptions to the claim. But if I had to make a blanket statement, it would absolutely be in favor of AMD.

13th gen, i7-13700k. (!)

On what workloads? AMD is king for most games, and for less price. It's also king for heavily multicore workloads, but not on the same CPU as for games.

In other words, they don't have a CPU that is king for both at the same time. That's the one thing Intel was good at, provided you could cool the damn thing.

Isn't the 360's failure rate due to MS rushing to release it before the PS3?

There's also Intel holding the x86 patent and AMD holding the x64 patent. Those two aren't going anywhere yet.

I guess i agree. I haven't seen any bombshell innovation since 6th core CPUs.

The QA teams are the corners being cut.

I mean, I'm sure Intel cares.

My problem is really in how they handled the situation once they knew that there was a problem, not even the initial manufacturing defect.

Yes, okay. They didn't know exactly the problem, didn't know exactly the scope, and didn't have a fix. Fine. I get that that is a really hard problem to solve.

But they knew that there was a problem.

Putting out a list of known-affected processors and a list of known-possibly-affected processors at the earliest date would have at least let their customers do what is possible to mitigate the situation. And I personally think that they shouldn't have been selling more of the potentially-affected processors until they'd figured out the problem sufficient to ensure that people who bought new ones wouldn't be affected.

And I think that, at first opportunity, they should have advised customers as to what Intel planned to do, at least within the limits of certainty (e.g. if Intel can confirm that the problem is due to an Intel manufacturing or design problem, then Intel will issue a replacement to consumers who can send in affected CPUs) and what customers should do (save purchase documentation or physical CPUs).

Those are things that Intel could certainly have done but didn't. This is the first statement they've made with some of that kind of information.

It might have meant that an Intel customer holds off on an upgrade to a potentially-problematic processor. Maybe those customers would have been fine taking the risk or just waiting for Intel to figure out the issue, issue an update, and make sure that they used updated systems with the affected processors. But they would have at least been going into this with their eyes open, and been able to mitigate some of the impact.

Like, I think that in general, the expectation should be that a manufacturer who has sold a product with a defect should put out what information they can to help customers mitigate the impact, even if that information is incomplete, at the soonest opportunity. And I generally don't think that a manufacturer should sell a product with known severe defects (of the "it might likely destroy itself in a couple months" variety).

I think that one should be able to expect that a manufacturer do so even today. If there are some kind of reasons that they are not willing to do so (e.g. concerns about any statement affecting their position in potential class-action suits), I'd like regulators to restructure the rules to eliminate that misincentive. Maybe it could be a stick, like "if you don't issue information dealing with known product defects of severity X within N days, you are exposed to strict liability". Or a carrot, like "any information in public statements provided to consumers with the intent of mitigating harm caused by a defective product may not be introduced as evidence in class action lawsuits over the issue". But I want manufacturers of defective products to act, not to just sit there clammed up, even if they haven't figured out the full extent of the problem, because they are almost certainly in a better position to figure out the problem and issue information to mitigate it than their customers individually are, and in this case, Intel just silently sat there for a very long time while a lot of their customers tried to figure out the scope of what was going wrong, and often spent a lot of money trying to address the problem themselves when more information from Intel probably would have avoided them incurring some of those costs.

That will surely earn trust with the public and result in brand loyalty, right???

That's where the lawsuits will start flying. I wouldn't be surprised if they knock off 5-15% of performance. That's enough to put it well below comparable AMD products in almost every application. If performance is dropped after sale, there's a pretty good chance of a class action suit.

Intel might have a situation here like the XBox 360 Red Ring of Death. Totally kills any momentum they had and hands a big victory to their competitor. This at a time when Intel wasn't in a strong place to begin with.

They aren't over clocking / under clocking anything with the fix. The chip was just straight up requesting more voltage than it actually needed, this didn't give any benefit and was probably an issue even without the damage it causes, due to extra heat generated.

They probably will at least RMA the really frequently crashing ones. To my knowledge they self-reported when they discovered the problem and the fix so they'd be looking at a lawsuit if they didn't do at least that.

How much further beyond that they'll go is what we still have to see. If they have a crazy number of CPUs still dying at 4-5 years old and don't cover with an extended warranty than fuck em...But we have to wait and see what they actually do first before making that judgement.

I wouldn't conclude that from an Intel Employee even if they did claim it because they(Intel) already lied multiple times in this afair.

But they didn't even do that, they just said desktop processors are affected, this doesn't say mobile ones are not.

Many companies have already reported that their telemetry records many crashes with the exact same symptoms and software on their laptops while AMD still isn't affected.

Could also be the fucking GPU of it's doing that, apparently

Had some sag on my GPU after years and didn't really notice. Tried troubleshooting and was about to go mad til someone on Reddit from a year ago had a comment saying to try resetting the GPU and then bracketing it

Sure as shit it worked

I'll trade you for a S Florida car even-even

I'll make a keychain out of them.

Apparently... "it's complicated". There ARE Raptor lake variants of this CPU, they are just less common.

https://www.hwcooling.net/en/not-every-core-i5-13400f-is-the-same-raptor-b0-vs-alder-c0-lake-review/

Only way to tell if it's Alder or Raptor is by checking the S-Spec Code:

Alder Lake, S-Spec code SRMBN
Raptor Lake, S-Spec code SRMBG

Well that would be nice! Thanks for the tip!

Yay. Fun times all around.

So the bios update wouldn’t already put my chip within safer operating parameters? I also have to undervolt it?

yes and i was recommended by my old friend and the internet amd

I got a 12700KF for free.

I'm not one to complain about that :)