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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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.

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

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