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)!

ARM looking pretty good too these days

Smells like a future class action lawsuit to me.

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.

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.

Aaaaaand it’s been cancelled by the issuing party.

I want to say gamers rise up, but honestly gamers calling their member of Congress every day and asking what they’re doing about this fraud would be way more effective. Congress is in a Big Tech regulating mood right now

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.

Even worse, there were no conditions to the funding. They just wrote a check.

Prebuilts and laptops

The only problem they ever had was back in the day they overheated easily.

That's not true. It was just last year that some of the Ryzen 7000 models were burning themselves out from the insides at default settings (within AMD specs) due to excessive SoC voltage. They fixed it through new specs and working with board manufacturers to issue new BIOS, and I think they eventually gave in to pressure to cover the damaged units. I guess we'll see if Intel ends up doing the same.

I generally agree with your sentiment, though. :)

I just wish both brands would chill. Pushing the hardware so hard for such slim gains is wasting power and costing customers.

rarely have been surpassed by much for long.

I've been on team AMD for over 20 years now but that's not true. The CoreDuo and the first couple of I CPUS were better than what AMD was offering and were for a decade. The Athlon were much better than the Pentium 3 and P4, the Ryzen are better than the current I series but the Phenom weren't. Don't get me wrong, I like my Phenom II X4 but it objectively wasn't as good as Intel's offerings back in the day.

This would be funny if it happened to Nvidia.

Hope Intel recovers from this. Imagine if Nvidia was the only consumer hardware manufacturer…

Lol there was a reason Xbox 360s had a whopping 54% failure rate and every OEM was getting sued in the late 2000s for chip defects.

As compared to a recall and re-fitting a fab, a class action is probably the cheaper way out.

I wish companies cared about what they sold instead of picking the cheapest way out, but welcome to the world we live in.

They cant even commit to offering RMAs, period. They keep using vague, cant-be-used-against-me-in-a-court-of-law language.

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.

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.