Intel’s Atom C2000 chips are bricking products, and it’s not just Cisco hit

"The problem in the chipset was traced back to a transistor in the 3Gbps PLL clocking tree. The aforementioned transistor has a very thin gate oxide, which allows you to turn it on with a very low voltage. Unfortunately in this case Intel biased the transistor with too high of a voltage, resulting in higher than expected leakage current. Depending on the physical characteristics of the transistor the leakage current here can increase over time which can ultimately result in this failure on the 3Gbps ports."

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4143/the-source-of-intels-coug...

I have 2x C2758 Supermicro boxes running core routing services and a Synology RS2416+ for storage - all on the affected CPU list - guess I better double check my backups are working and allocate some funds for replacement kit in case things go belly up!

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/web/clock-signal.html#~...

Also, I'm reasonably sure many of these were sold already permanently affixed to the motherboard, so the fix may be worse than swapping out just a CPU.

C2308, C2338, C2350, C2358, C2508, C2518, C2530, C2538, C2550, C2558, C2718, C2730, C2738, C2750, and C2758.

How to tell what CPU your Synology NAS has:

https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Ge...

My 3-month old 1815+ is on the list...

Are Cisco products worth the money ?

Personally i haven't had that much experience with their stuff, but i remember seeing a brand new router running hot with two fans blowing in it (other routers at the time were 2x smaller without fans). I understand that Cisco should be the de facto networking standard, but is it really worth the name ?

And some technical specifics behind the problem: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10214953&cid=53819967

Can't post to The Register, since they don't have ACs.

Anyway, the issue is damage to the LPC (low-pin-count) bus clock line. This is a secondary bus where you hang old ISA-style devices, like the system FLASH. If the FLASH is the only thing in there, it will mostly render the system unbootable (so, stuff that never gets power-cycled would just keep going). But LPC can generate interrupts, and one often hangs other crap to that bus, such as i2c controllers for hot-swap bays, motherboard management controllers, and other sensors. In that case, you can expect severe runtime misbehavior.

The issue is caused by "continuous degradation due to use", so repairing it is easy, if costly: replace the motherboard with a new one under warranty (and even if out of warranty period wherever this kind of "stealth" manufacturing defect is not subject to warranty time period limitations, such as in Brazil). It will "reset" the counter. This is your zero-day solution to the issue.

Depending on time-to-market for the new stepping (hardware revision) B1/C0 of the Atom C2000, you might need an interim solution, which is the "platform-level change", i.e. redesigned board with extra components that work around Intel's hardware design error. As soon as you have these, you start using these to replace any boards returned due to the defect, or start a "recall" to preemptively replace boards.

Depending on the total cost of the board plus other components, you keep the old boards you replaced around, and when revision B1/C0 of the Atom C2000 is out, you BGA-replace them in a factory (about US$ 25 per board in large volumes, if that much), maybe replace any liquid electrolytic capacitors and other crap that ages badly, and use the boards either as new or as refurbished, depending on your corporate/regulatory ethics. This kind of repair almost always really resets the boards MTBF. If Intel supplies the replacement Atoms at no charge, the cost of repair might well be far less than the cost of the production run for boards you'd want to keep around for warranty services, anyway.

Mind you, at 1.5 years per failure, it will be rare the legislation/contract that forces more than one replacement... so, let's hope they don't replace a faulty board with a brand-new virgin but-still-timebombed board. You'd have trouble to replace it a second time if it fails after the warranty period.

The BIOS is a piece of shit. It's buggy, the legacy-BIOS support is unstable, the Win7-EFI and Win8-EFI modes are not good either. I patched a Win7 DVD with Win8 files, so that I could install Win7. Now Win7 runs great and stable - but only after I installed various Intel drivers that fixed the hardware flaws.

I am seriously looking forward to the upcoming new AMD CPU - Intel dod barely anything the last five years, a 2011 highend CPU is almost as fast as Intel 2017 flagship, and costed a lot less back then, had less DRM or other shit that is broken. Intel needs a proper competitor, so a comeback of AMD on the one side, and Apple notebooks with ARM CPU are very welcome to stop Intel from siting on their quasi monopoly chair.