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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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People are freaking out about the lack of a recall but intel says their patch that will supposedly stop currently working cpus from experiencing the overvolt condition that is leading to the failure. So they don't really need to do a recall if currently working CPUs will stay working with the patch in place. As long as they offer some sort of free extended warranty and a good RMA proccess for the CPUs that are already damaged I feel it's fine.
If they RMA with a bump in perf for those affected it might even be positive PR like "they stand by their products" but if they're stingy with responsibility then we should obviously give them hell. We really have to see how they handle this.
They cant even commit to offering RMAs, period. They keep using vague, cant-be-used-against-me-in-a-court-of-law language.
That will surely earn trust with the public and result in brand loyalty, right???
Oh you mean they're going to underclock the expensive new shit I bought and have it underperform to fix their fuck up?
What an unacceptable solution.
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.
I think a spot that might land them in a bit of hot water will be what specs they use for the chips after the "fix". Will they update the specs to reflect the now slower speeds? My money would be them still listing the full chooch chip killing specs.
It has been wise for years to subtract 15-20% off Intel's initial performance claims and benchmarks at release. Spectre and Meltdown come to mind, for example. There's always some post-release patch that hobbles the performance, even when the processors are stable. Intel's corporate culture is to push the envelope just a little too far then walk it back quietly after the initial positive media coverage is taken care of.
Yes, but lucky for some of us that practice is still illegal in parts of the world. I just don't get why they still get away with it (they do get fines but the over all practice is still normalized).
I sure would not want any 13 or 14 gen Intel in any equipment I was responsible for. Think of the risk over any IT departments head with these CPUs in production, you would never really trust them again.
If people bought it at one spec and now it's lower, that could be enough. It would have made the decision different at purchase time.
It would be breach of implied warranty/false advertisement if they keep selling them with the old specs at least.
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.
Giving a CPU more voltage is just what overclocking is. Considering that most of these modern CPUs from both AMD and Intel have already been designed to start clocking until it reaches a high enough temp to start thermally throttling, it's likely that there was a misstep in setting this threshold and the CPU doesn't know when to quit until it kills itself. In the process it is undoubtedly gaining more performance than it otherwise would, but probably not by much, considering a lot of the high end CPUs already have really high thresholds, some even at 90 or 100 C.
If you actually knew anything you'd know that overclockers tend to manually reduce the voltage as they increase the clock speeds to improve stability, this only works up to a point, but clearly shows voltage does not directly influence clock speed.
Ah, got me with a reverse gish gallop. Now I'm an idiot, oh no...
If you give a chip more voltage, its transistors will switch faster, but they'll degrade faster. Ideally, you want just barely enough voltage that everything's reliably finished switching and all signals have propagated before it's time for the next clock cycle, as that makes everything work and last as long as possible. When the degradation happens, at first it means things need more voltage to reach the same speed, and then they totally stop working. A little degradation over time is normal, but it's not unreasonable to hope that it'll take ten or twenty years to build up enough that a chip stops working at its default voltage.
The microcode bug they've identified and are fixing applies too much voltage to part of the chip under specific circumstances, so if an individual chip hasn't experienced those circumstances very often, it could well have built up some degradation, but not enough that it's stopped working reliably yet. That could range from having burned through a couple of days of lifetime, which won't get noticed, to having a chip that's in the condition you'd expect it to be in if it was twenty years old, which still could pass tests, but might keel over and die at any moment.
If they're not doing a mass recall, and can't come up with a test that says how affected an individual CPU has been without needing to be so damaged that it's no longer reliable, then they're betting that most people's chips aren't damaged enough to die until the after warranty expires. There's still a big difference between the three years of their warranty and the ten to twenty years that people expect a CPU to function for, and customers whose parts die after thirty-seven months will lose out compared to what they thought they were buying.
No refunds for the fried ones should be all you need to see about hwp they "handle" this.
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.
For what it's worth my i9-13900 was experiencing serious instability issues. Disabling turbo helped a lot but Intel offered to replace it under warranty and I'm going through that now. Customer support on the issue seems to be pretty good from my experience.