If your cutting edge gaming rig has an Intel inside sticker on it, it might actually have a ticking time bomb inside.
the most important spec is not the clock speed,
it's not the number of cores or threads, it's not the transistor count, and not the cache size.
The most important thing is actually something we fail to think about, the failure rate.
We don't think about the this, because modern CPUs rarely fail due to manufacturing defects.
They're engineered with such a high degree of precision that it makes rocket surgeons look like morons.
No matter how good your CPU specs are, it's all completely pointless if the chip is unstable.
Well, Intel's 13th and gen chips can allegedly achieve an impressive 100% failure rate in certain contexts.
will look at the overflowing stack of problems facing Intel chips and find out if it's time to hit panic mode.
It is July 15, 2024, and you're watching the code report.
For decades, Intel has dominated the CPU chip market.
The company was founded in 1968 and gave us the first dynamic RAM chip in 1970,
then released the 4004 in 1971, which was the first commercial microprocessor.
That later evolved into the x86 architecture and the company has been printing money ever since,
but the gravy train on biscuit wheels is starting to derail.
A big problem with the 13th and gen Intel CPUs,
also known as Raptor Lake,
has been building up over the last six months, and it appears nobody knows exactly what the hell is going on.
The issues appeared back in February when PC gamers playing games with DirectX 12 and Handbrake started to experience frequent crashes.
Initially, the blame was placed on Nvidia GeForce graphics drivers, but in April Nvidia
was like no, and blamed Intel for GPU VRAM issues and told users to contact Intel support.
games, which powers compression in Unreal Engine, discovered that high default clock rates and power usage could be leading to silicon degradation and instability.
Eventually, the main fix for this issue was to underclock these CPUs at a lower voltage.
Shortly after, motherboard manufacturers began rolling out BIOS updates with an Intel baseline profile to provide these weak-ass underclocks.
settings, resulting in an estimated 9% performance loss, although Intel itself was not recommending these settings directly.
a leaked internal document from Intel is said the root cause of instability was an incorrect value in the microcode algorithm associated with the
E-TVB feature, or enhanced thermal velocity boost.
However, after the leak, Intel denied that the was the root cause, but they did admit that it could be a contributing factor.
a bunch of game devs like Alderaan,
which makes an MMO that lets you live out your dream of being a dinosaur,
released a bombshell post, alleging that 100% of the time these chips will fail every time.
They fail for end users, they fail on game servers, they fail for developers, and worst of all, they provide money.
misleading error messages about running out of video driver memory even when they have sufficient memory.
And prescribed remedy is to have Intel recall these CPUs and refund consumers.
That's pretty harsh, and it's kind of ironic that these dinosaur guys hate Raptor-like chips.
But companies like Epic Games and RAD game tools have also highlighted these issues, and in an analysis done by Warframe produced this day.
damming pie chart that showed how it's only the Raptor-like chips that are causing problems.
To make matters even worse,
YouTuber Level 1 text analyzed a bunch of crash telemetry data from data centers and found that yes,
indeed, there is a huge stability problem with these chips.
I don't want to spoil the details, so check out his video for a full breakdown, but obviously we've got a big problem here.
I've got an Intel chip in my mic.
Thank God it's a twelfth gen,
but I'm going to build a new regulator this year, and it's hard to imagine not using an AMD processor at this point.
Intel put out a statement that reassured us Intel bros that they're working on it,
although the investigation is not easy, which is corporate speak for we have no idea what the hell is going on.
And really I can't blame them, because I don't think I could do a better job making a bunch of electrons dance around.
