Intel has not halted sales or clawed back any inventory. It will not do a recall, period.
Buy AMD. Got it!
I’ve been buying AMD for – holy shit – 25 years now, and have never once regretted it. I don’t consider myself a fanboi; I just (a) prefer having the best performance-per-dollar rather than best performance outright, and (b) like rooting for the underdog.
But if Intel keeps fucking up like this, I might have to switch on grounds of (b)!
spoiler
(Realistically I’d be more likely to switch to ARM or even RISCV, though. Even if Intel became an underdog, my memory of their anti-competitive and anti-consumer bad behavior remains long.)
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.
It’s good to feel proud of where you work. I’m not too sure on whether or not Intel treats their workers good though, do they?
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.
Honestly I was and am, an AMD fan but if you went back a few years you would not have wanted and AMD laptop. I had one and it was truly awful.
Battery issues. Low processing power. App crashes and video playback issues. And this was on a more expensive one with a dedicated GPU…
And then Ryzen came out. You can get AMD laptops now and I mean that like they exist, but also, as they actually are nice. (Have one)
But in 2013 it was Intel or you were better off with nothing.
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 ran an AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition for ~5 years, then gave it to a friend who ran it for another 5 years. We overclocked the hell out of it up to 4ghz, and there is no way you were getting gaming performance that good from Intel dollar-for-dollar, so no AMD did not suck from Core 2 on. You need to shift that timeframe up to Bulldozer, and even then Bulldozer and the other FX CPUs ended up aging better than their Intel counterparts, and at their adjusted prices were at least reasonable products.
Doesn’t change the fact AMD lied about Bulldozer, nor does it change Intel using its market leader position to release single-digit performance increases for a decade and strip everything i5 and lower down to artificially make i7 more valuable. Funny how easy it is to forget how shit it was to be a PC gamer then after two crypto booms.
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.
Yeah, I manage the infrastructure for almost 150 WordPress sites, and I moved them all to ARM servers a while ago, because they’re 10% or 20% cheaper on AWS.
Websites are rarely bottlenecked by the CPU, so that power efficiency is very significant.
Linux works great on ARM, I just want something similar to most mini-ITX boards (4x SATA, 2x mini-PCIe, and RAM slots), and I’ll convert my DIY NAS to ARM. But there just isn’t anything between RAM-limited SBCs and datacenter ARM boards.
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.
Depends on the desktop. I have a NanoPC T4, originally as a set top box (that’s what the RK3399 was designed for, has a beast of a VPU) now on light server and wlan AP duty, and it’s plenty fast enough for a browser and office. Provided you give it an SSD, that is.
Speaking of Desktop though the graphics driver situation is atrocious. There’s been movement since I last had a monitor hooked up to it but let’s just say the linux blob that came with it could do gles2, while the android driver does vulkan. Presumably because ARM wants Rockchip to pay per fucking feature per OS for Mali drivers.
Oh the VPU that I mentioned? As said, a beast, decodes 4k h264 at 60Hz, very good driver support, well-documented instruction set, mpv supports it out of the box, but because the Mali drivers are shit you only get an overlay, no window system integration because it can’t paint to gles2 textures. Throwback to the 90s.
Sidenote some madlads got a dedicated GPU running on the thing. M.2 to PCIe adapter, and presumably a lot of duct tape code.
hmm. not really. I can’t beat AMD. Only in power-consumption, sure, but not in real performance.
ARM is only more power efficient below 10 to 15 W or so. Above that, doesn’t matter much between ARM and x86.
The real benefit is somewhat abstract. Only two companies can make x86, and only one of them knows how to do it well. ARM (and RISC V) opens up the market to more players.
Kinda? It really should be treated as a 1st generation product for Windows (because the previous versions were ignored by, well, everyone because they were utterly worthless), and should be avoided for quite a while if gaming is remotely your goal. It’s probably the future, but the future is later… assuming, of course, that the next gen x86 CPUs don’t both get faster and lower power (which they are) and thus eliminate the entire benefit of ARM.
And, if you DONT use Windows, you’re looking at a couple of months to a year to get all the drivers in the Linux kernel, then the kernel with the drivers into mainstream distributions, assuming Qualcomm doesn’t do their usual thing of just abandoning support six months in because they want you to buy the next release of their chips instead.
You mean the type where the lawyers get eight figure payouts and you get a ten dollar check?
Yes. Problem is, this is the only way our system of justice allows for keeping companies accountable. They still pay out the nose on their end.
However, in this case, there’s a lot of big companies that would also be part of the class. Some from oem desktop systems in offices, and also for some servers. The 13\14900k has a lot of cores, and there’s quite a few server motherboards that accept it. It was often a good choice over going Xeon or EPYC.
Those companies are now looking over at the 7950x, noticing it’s faster, uses less power, and doesn’t crash.
They’re not going to be satisfied with a $10 check.
Yeah that’s pretty shitty to continue to sell a part that they know is defective.
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.
Nobody objects to binning, because people know what they’re getting and the part functions within the specified parameters.
I have a 13 series chip, it had some reproducible crashing issues that so far have subsided by downclocking it. It is in the window they’ve shared for the oxidation issue. At this point there’s no reliable way of knowing to what degree I’m affected, by what type of issue, whether I should wait for the upcoming patch or reach out to see if they’ll replace it.
I am not happy about it.
Obviously next time I’d go AMD, just on principle, but this isn’t the 90s anymore. I could do a drop-in replacement to another Intel chip, but switching platforms is a very expensive move these days. This isn’t just a bad CPU issue, this could lead to having to swap out two multi-hundred dollar componenet, at least on what should have been a solidly future-proof setup for at least five or six years.
I am VERY not happy about it.
I’m angry on your behalf. If you have to downclock the part so that it works, then you’ve been scammed. It’s fraud to sell a part as a higher performing part when it can’t deliver that performance.
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.
150W instead of 250
Yeah, when I saw that the CPU could pull 250W, I initially thought that it was a misprint in the spec sheet. That is kind of a nutty number. I have a space heater that can run at low at 400W, which is getting into that range, and you can get very low-power space heaters that consume less power than the TDP on that processor. That’s an awful lot of heat to be putting into an incredibly small, fragile part.
That being said, I don’t believe that Intel intentionally passed the initial QA for the 13th generation thinking that there were problems. They probably thought there was a healthy safety margin. You can certainly blame them for insufficient QA or for how they handled the problem as the issue was ongoing, though.
And you could also have said “this is absurd” at many times in the past when other performance barriers came up. I remember – a long time ago now – when the idea of processors that needed active cooling or they would destroy themselves seemed rather alarming and fragile. I mean, fans do fail. Processors capable of at least shutting down on overheat to avoid destroying themselves, or later throttling themselves, didn’t come along until much later. But if we’d stopped with passive heatsink cooling, we’d be using far slower systems (though probably a lot quieter!)
Could you not have just bought a lower power chip then?
Or does that loose you cores?
I have a 13 series chip, it had some reproducible crashing issues that so far have subsided by downclocking it.
From the article:
the company confirmed a patch is coming in mid-August that should address the “root cause” of exposure to elevated voltage. But if your 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processor is already crashing, that patch apparently won’t fix it.
Citing unnamed sources, Tom’s Hardware reports that any degradation of the processor is irreversible, and an Intel spokesperson did not deny that when we asked.
If your CPU is already crashing then that’s it, game over. The upcoming patch cannot fix it. You’ve got to figure out if you can do a warranty replacement or continue to live with workarounds like you’re doing now.
Their retail boxed CPUs usually have a 3(?) year warranty so for a 13th gen CPU you may be midway or at the tail end of that warranty period. If it’s OEM, etc. it could be a 1 year warranty aka Intel isn’t doing anything about it unless a class action suit forces them :/
The whole situation sucks and honestly seems a bit crazy that Intel hasn’t already issued a recall or dealt with this earlier.
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”.
They do say that you can contact Intel customer support if you have an affected CPU, and that they’re replacing CPUs that have been actually damaged. I don’t know – and Intel may not know – what information or proof you need, but my guess is that it’s good odds that you can get a replacement CPU. So there probably is some level of recourse.
Now, obviously that’s still a bad situation. You’re out the time that you didn’t have a stable system, out the effort you put into diagnosing it, maybe have losses from system downtime (like, I took an out-of-state trip expecting to be able to access my system remotely and had it hang due to the CPU damage at one point), maybe out data you lost from corruption, maybe out money you spent trying to fix the problem (like, on other parts).
But I’d guess that specifically for the CPU, if it’s clearly damaged, you have good odds of being able to at least get a non-damaged replacement CPU at some point without needing to buy it. It may not perform as well as the generation had initially been benchmarked at. But it should be stable.
Yeah. They can’t replace it with their upcoming 15th gen, because that uses a new, incompatible socket. They’d apparently been handing replacement CPUs out to large customers to replace failed processors, according to one of Steve Burke’s past videos on the subject.
On a motherboard that has the microcode update which they’re theoretically supposed to get out in a month or so, the processors should at least refrain from destroying themselves, though I expect that they’ll probably run with some degree of degraded performance from the update.
Just guessing, not anything Burke said, but if there’s enough demand for replacement CPUs, might also be possible that they’ll do another 14th gen production run, maybe fixing the oxidation issue this time, so that the processors could work as intended.
“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.
Went 13th -> 14th very early in both’s launch cycles because of chronic crashing. After about swapping mobo, RAM and SSDs i finally swapped to AMD and my build from late 2022 is FINALLY stable. Wendell’s video was the catalyst to jump ship. I thought I was going crazy, but yea… it was intel
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.
Yea, my crashes were either watchdog BSODs, or nvldkkm (nvidia). So diagnosing the issue was super difficult, the CPU is the last thing I think of unless there’s some evidence of it failing :).
I also got to experience a cable mod adapter burn a 4090… Zotac replaced the card thank god. I’m a walking billboard of what went wrong in the last 2 years with components lol.
Anyhow I hope we all get a refund. My PC is my main hobby so having instability caused a ton of frustration and anguish.
When did you buy it? Depending on the credit card you have, they will sometimes extend on any manufacturer warranty by a year or two. Might be worth checking.
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?
Nope, pretty much none in most cases. Though this is probably going to devolve into a giant class-action, because it is pretty egregious… so affected people will get something like $6.71 and the lawyers will walk away with a couple billion or whatever.
switching platforms is a very expensive move these days.
It’s just a motherboard and a cpu. Everything else is cross compatible, likely even your cpu cooler. If you just buy another intel chip… it’s just gonna oxidize again.
$370 for a 7800x3d https://www.microcenter.com/product/674503/amd-ryzen-7-7800x3d-raphael-am5-42ghz-8-core-boxed-processor-heatsink-not-included
~$200 for a motherboard.
Personally i’d wait for the next release to drop in a month… or until your system crashes aren’t bearable / it’s worth making the change. I just don’t see the cost as prohibitive, it’s about on par with all the alternatives. Plus you could sell your old motherboard for something.
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.
No, I have a DDR5 setup. Which is why my motherboard was way more expensive than 100 bucks.
The problem isn’t upgrading to a entry level AM5 motherboard, the problem is that to get back to where I am with my rather expensive Intel motherboard I have to spend a lot more than that. Moving to AMD doesn’t mean I want to downgrade.
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.
Don’t worry. I’m sure the $10 Doordash card is coming to an inbox near you!
Intel is about to have a lot of lawsuits on their hands if this delay deny deflect strategy doesn’t work out for them. This problem has been going on for over a year and the details Intel lets slip just keep getting worse and worse. The more customers that realize they’re getting defective CPUs, the more outcry there’ll be for a recall. Intel is going to be in a lot of trouble if they wait until regulators force them to have a recall.
Big moment of truth is next month when they have earnings and we see what the performance impact from dropping voltages will be. Hopefully it’ll just be 5% and no more CPUs die. I can’t imagine investors will be happy about the cost, though.
A few years ago now I was thinking that it was about time for me to upgrade my desktop (with a case that dates back to 2000 or so, I guess they call them “sleepers” these days?) because some of my usual computer things were taking too long.
And I realized that Intel was selling the 12th generation of the Core at that point, which means the next one was a 13th generation and I dono, I’m not superstitious but I figured if anything went wrong I’d feel pretty darn silly. So I pulled the trigger and got a 12th gen core processor and motherboard and a few other bits.
This is quite amusing in retrospect.
I recently built myself a computer, and went with AMD’s 3d cache chips and boy am I glad. I think I went 12th Gen for my brothers computer but it was mid range which hasn’t had these issues to my knowledge.
Also yes, sleeper is the right term.
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.
