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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

It's not FUD to point to real problems that are occurring in the field. A processor that's unstable is still unstable even if it's covered by warranty. And to the extent that these real issues are being caused by aggressive motherboard defaults, Intel is not absolved: they have huge leverage over their motherboard partners, and are seemingly failing to use it to ensure users get a good, stable experience out of the box (likely because Intel cares more about high scores on popular benchmarks than about subtle stability issues in this market segment).

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Yes, real problems stemming from factory-defective products or products that were driven out of spec. The article linked even admits they (author or publisher) don't have enough evidence to pinpoint what the problem is; the best they could do was the aforementioned. Nowhere do they say "Driving 1.4V is killing CPUs." or something similar; just potential workarounds like reducing clock multipliers below spec and configuring mobos to enforce Intel's power limits.

Drive known-good products according to published specifications at load for statistically significant durations. If the results are that the majority of products fail to perform as warranted, then we can talk about how Intel (and I guess AMD) are driving their products to the point of failure.

Otherwise in the absence of such data, I'm going to look at the silent majority satisfied with their purchases and infer that the products concerned are working fine.

> If the results are that the majority of products fail to perform as warranted, then we can talk about how Intel (and I guess AMD) are driving their products to the point of failure.

That's a stupidly high bar. Recalls and class-action lawsuits don't need to be justified by failure rates as high as 50%, and I'm merely discussing that there are signs of trouble, not demanding a recall or other serious action from Intel. Intel's recent top of the line desktop chips are misbehaving in a way that is genuinely noteworthy, even if we don't have the impact solidly quantified and don't have a smoking gun. It's worth discussing, and worth keeping an eye out for similar issues from other chips that are being pushed to similar extremes.

>Intel's recent top of the line desktop chips are misbehaving in a way that is genuinely noteworthy, even if we don't have the impact solidly quantified and don't have a smoking gun.

And all I am asking is for you to cite proper evidence for your claim. The article you linked does not say driving 1.4V is damaging the CPUs, it's actually explicit that the cause is unknown. Speaking more broadly, most people who have bought the CPUs concerned have had no problems (or at least do not voice such concerns).

To reiterate, I am asking you to cite evidence for your claim that "Intel and AMD are pushing 1.4V into chips built on processes that work best at and below 1V. And the result isn't a stable, long-lasting chip." If you can't or won't, this is just FUD.

If the instability is something that develops over time as a genuine change in behavior of the chip, and not merely an artifact due to the evidence of instability taking time to pile up, then the extreme voltages are by far the most plausible culprit. And if on the other hand these chips are slightly unstable out of the box, despite the high voltages required to hit these peak frequencies and record-setting benchmark scores, it suggests that the clock speeds are being pushed too far.

Either way, the high operating voltages compared to what we see in laptop and server CPUs (and GPUs for any market segment) is worth raising an eyebrow. At a minimum, it's a symptom of the desperation Intel and AMD have for perennially leapfrogging each other in ways that are increasingly irrelevant to the average customer and the rest of their product stack.

Would be nice to refer to something that does not say the reason is unknown anyway.

Some of this is modeled over expected life-time / usage. In general, things such as electro migration, self-heating, bit-cell degradation, etc. are modeled either for 3y, 5y or 10y, depending on CPU, skew, and target market. Now, whether the process corner(s), voltage, frequency that was picked to perform this analysis is a good reflection of how the CPU is being actually used/pushed, is a different matter.

This explains a lot about my computer experiences over the last few years. I've been buying absolute top end hardware, and been consistently running into a plethora of absolute weird technical issues unlike any of my previous experiences. I even had to rma a 12900ks directly with Intel after it couldn't run at stock settings bug free.

>If the instability is something that develops over time as a genuine change in behavior of the chip, and not merely an artifact due to the evidence of instability taking time to pile up, then the extreme voltages are by far the most plausible culprit.

That's all fine and dandy, but can you please cite some evidence to support those claims?

This should not be such a farfetched request.

Exactly, a warranty is fine in theory, but I care about machine uptime and where my own time is going.

Often the time to deal with warranty exceeds the cost of a new component, in which case I don’t bother and just try a different brand.

Case in point, had some trouble with WD NVME drives - just tossed them, bought Samsung, and moved on.

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