Intel confirms oxidation and excessive voltage in 13th and 14th Gen CPUs [video]
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People routinely clown on companies for downtime but do not celebrate sending multiple MB pictures and videos over cell networks in remote locations from a super computer in their pocket.
Even 95% reliability is relatively good for networks working across the globe relative to what we've had through most of history.
The average person easily plays into the trope that no one appreciates IT when it works, but readily has opinions when there are problems.
The math and engineering behind dam construction are well understood but actually getting them built in practice is a years long story of yak shaving, cat herding, and trying to overcome every little piece of BS nature has to throw at the project. Unique and predictable geological conditions, unknown underground water sources, unexpected soil composition changes, surprise fault lines. Then there's the logistical nightmare of actually moving all the equipment in and earth out, the weather and environmental factors that impede every action, humans ignoring safety altogether, and so on and on. All of this implemented by workers on the ground who just barely know what's going on (for no fault of their own).
I'm continually surprised that anything complicated ever gets built at all.
Processors are known for their reliability. Everything else will break first in a computer
AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm are TSMC customers.
The choice of voltage scaling is not.
If it's a Zeiss lens imperfection, a broken ASML machine, water or silicon impurity, etc, what matters to the customer is the final product you're buying.
We appreciate the excitement around Ryzen 9000 series processors. During final checks, we found the initial production units that were shipped to our channel partners did not meet our full quality expectations. Out of an abundance of caution and to maintain the highest quality experiences for every Ryzen user, we are working with our channel partners to replace the initial production units with fresh units.
As a result, there will be a short delay in retail availability. The Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X processors will now go on sale on August 8th and the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X processors will go on sale on August 15th. We pride ourselves in providing a high-quality experience for every Ryzen user, and we look forward to our fans having a great experience with the new Ryzen 9000 series.
Jack Huynh, AMD SVP and GM of Computing and Graphics
Intel's been a disgrace, and that's why these chips suck. Imagine having all of the money and hiring everyone in sight and pulling all sorts of self-serving, dirty tricks industry-wide yet still letting an underdog on the verge of bankruptcy (AMD) beat you to 7 nm and eat your lunch.
I went through 3 motherboards hoping it was that, and not the insanely expensive CPU that would be a pain to RMA. But as it turns out, the RMA process was very quick and painless once I provided my troubleshooting history. But due to it being my main computer that I make my money with, I had to buy another processor to fill the 2 week gap between sending the old one and receiving the new one.
I probably spend $1500 or more on this problem, and by the sounds of it, my troubles might not be over.
As for having to prove I did ample troubleshooting, the last thing I wanted was to mail it in and have it returned because they couldn't find anything wrong with it, which has happened to me with other things in the past.
Odds are good I won't be bothering with Intel hardware or recommending it to others for the next decade or more - this has been a flatly terrible experience (and I'll note the irony of finally deciding to spend on a "dream build" and this being the result).
I did all sorts, switching from Windows 11 to 10, buying new memory (twice!!), countless days debugging, updating my bios, etc.
I'm relieved to finally have found the cause, but my goodwill for intel is burnt.
Do you know what the general fix is, is it just a BIOS update?
Not that this excuses anything, or is even a real fix for the issue , who knows. I wish I'd gotten a thread ripper instead and will be getting an AMD when I build a new system again.
A "solution" I had was to lower the amount of cores Blender could use to 12, instead of all of them, which was annoying, and that still only lowered the number of crashes, not stopped them. These crashes were bad too, in that they corrupted project files almost every time.
I basically did everything possible, with little success. All it did was make my computer slow to a crawl and still crash at random.
I don't know what I'm going to do next computer. AMD is seemingly having similar problems, so it's not like I can realistically switch with any confidence. I go close to 10 years between upgrades, so hopefully the landscape will look better then.
This is craftsmanship. John Doe can use Python to create software, and so can you, yet John Doe's code runs better and faster while your code crashes all the time.
People seem to forget that a craftsman's ability to use tools is a big factor in the final product.
Oxidation induced effects are a function of pushing the limits of nm scale transistor architectures though.
It's becoming a wide spread problem in the industry. For decades technology-minded folks have been told to go into software development because that's where the money is. The field of custom IC design has been both short on applicants and has had huge barriers to entry. As a result, the experienced engineers are retiring and there aren't enough juniors coming up to replace them. Skills and institutional knowledge are being lost.
There is a lot of focus right now on tools such as AI to allow junior people to produce things at an expert level based on encoding that expert knowledge. It would be great if it worked, but so far the results aren't there.
Source: I develop EDA software for custom IC design.
Yeah this is the result of that complacency. Ever since the first Ryzen launched Intel's become more and more irrelevant. If either AMD manages to capture the low TDP and embedded market or ARM improves in compatibility they'll become largely the last choice for anything. They're so damn lucky AMD is fantastic at shooting themselves in the foot.
https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Intel+Core+i7-2600...
Not sure there's gonna be a second Core to rescue them this time, but that doesn't mean they're dead though, far from it.
As part of the bathtub reliability curve its usual for a large fraction of failures early in life, how much over the usual failure curve are we?
It's still unclear what fraction of CPUs are impacted for both issues. Was oxidation a single fab just for a month and only 5% of produced CPUs? Is the microcode issue in TB 3.0 or TVB, so would only impact the 1[34]900s?
It's also unclear if once degraded it can still reliably work at say 95% peak frequency. In the case of a partial recall it might be worth a discount option if that is the case.
Anyway it's mostly speculation beyond Intel's post on their forum (+Reddit responses), it will be interested to see the next stages which will hopefully clarify some of these. This is just a discussion forum I'm sure the final detailed announcement will the made via their main communication channels.
July 2024 Update on Instability Reports on Intel Core 13th/14th Gen Desktop CPUs — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41039708 — 203 comments
lscpu | grep 'Model name'
For windows powershell.
wmic CPU get NAMELooks good to me.
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D5622AQHZXLE-cipmBA/feedsh...
No, most developers (and most people in general) use Windows. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/#1-operating...
Personally I use whatever boring laptop my company offers, and so far that's been Intel. As long as it runs Linux I don't care what's under the hood.
Title is ambiguous, it seems to imply 14th gen CPUs have oxidation issues, the video explains that the oxidation issues are only on an early run of 13th gen. If you own a 14th gen intel CPU you should be safe after applying the upcoming microcode update.
GN is sometimes really good and sometimes really bad. They do tons of great data-driven benchmarking and research like this, and then jump to bizarre conclusions at the end, or make bizarre proclamations like “long term value doesn’t exist because that’s not how money works”.
For a while back in 2019 they were declaring the death of 6-core CPUs because of 0.1% lows, and their supporting evidence basically was a couple obviously-broken games like BFV and Far Cry 5 where a 2C4T pentium was outscoring their 6C processor by a factor of 2 in the 0.1% lows… and they didn’t see a problem even when it was raised etc.
https://i.imgur.com/Py69p36.jpg
https://gamersnexus.net/images/media/2018/cpus/2600k/intel-i...
Another example was Steve insisting last december that “nvidia was leaving the gaming industry” because of “recent” quotes from Jensen about nvidia being an AI company now… and the citation literally on screen behind him dated the quotation to the mid-2010s. Raised it to him, doesn’t care. He got his clicks.
https://youtu.be/VSSb-t76EpU?t=147
Like, as the gaming community prepares for the launch of the 5090 sometime this fall or early next year… how’s that working out?
It’s not uncommon for steve to do this. Like there’s certainly an issue here, and oxidation is an issue that existed in the past. Steve thinks therefore that it must be the issue for all these chips, even though intel says that’s basically a small problem that was fixed over a year ago. Steve disagrees, on the basis of evidence such as:
(This space left intentionally blank)
Like people need to get it through their heads that reviewers are humans too, with their own foibles and weaknesses. Some articles he does incredible investigative work. Other ones he’s arguing that we need to abandon 6C processors in favor of (checks notes) stock 2C pentiums because of frametimes, or that spending more can never deliver long term value if it lasts better because “that’s not how money works” (exasperated Steve face). It all depends whether he’s being data driven or whether he’s engineering a support for an argument on a given day - he sucks way more when he’s working backwards to fit data to conclusion.
The final decision for a combination of this and unrelated reasons was to wait 6 months and see.
But if you need a laptop now, Lenovo has Ryzen options too.
The Ryzens would have been within budget but were simply not available locally in the Legion 7 form.
https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/lenovo-thinkpad-p1-gen-...
There’s a tonne of benefits to that approach, cooling, battery life and performance among them- and the ability to run tasks while your laptop is asleep.
I understand not wanting to own multiple devices, or cope with the power draw of an always on machine- but if you truly need such resources you will end up better off (even in the short term) with a dual system setup.
For ssh there’s mosh.
I’d buy “having to transfer files” more than latency, realistically.
Thanks for commenting though.
Often, but not always, big RAM requirements like that also involve big CPU or disk requirements that would be impractical in a laptop form factor.
I am not saying you will have it in an ultrabook form factor, but I had 32gb of ram in sandy bridge laptop (intel core i7 2700 ?) and 64 not that much later. That was like 10+ years ago. Those were desktop replacement and thicker style laptops, but not exactly unreasonable equipment.
Throw in almost always using a windoze vm for windoze things for another 8gb, at times other vm's using 4-8gb doing various things for testing, libreoffice with 20 complex spreadsheets, steam games, normal use really, all adds up to a lot of at minimum reserved memory far exceeding physical, at times things ballooning within that, and thus at times getting cranky to still oom occasionally.
I rather wonder who actually uses boxes with only 8gb of ram some still ship with.
Everyone else? :) Joking aside, the majority of people buy the MacBook Air, mostly with the minimum spec. Apple is expensive.
If I didn't have to run docker or didn't store media locally, I could very easily use one.
Windows 10/11 with 8GB of ram is comfortable, using just Chrome... 4GB and it's in swap.
2GB would be unusable despite Microsoft's minimums, you will be swapping constantly.
I am not saying everyone needs that much, just that the bar for what warrants a dedicated server rack keeps going up and 128gb in a thick laptop seems practical.
obviously that’s not the case here, but as a rule yeah, your cpu could have been reworked or something and it’s not normal for any brand to tell you that.
What? their price has been around 30 for months and it recently went up to 35 and now went back to 32~ although today many companies went down for significant %
EDIT - Why the downvotes? I seriously don't understand why they are doing it this way.
They have actively blamed other companies, like NVidia (not that I like them either, but they simply didn't cause this issue).
There are multiple teams claiming denied RMAs during the period Intel knew about the oxidation.
They didn't announce this until multiple outlets started talking about it.
They did 2 different announcements with different explanations and the more mild one first.
Their statements are contradictory at least in part.
This just isn't how people acting in good faith behave. Using intel's past behavior as an example they have previously handled problems. With spectre they were way more transparent and just published findinds on problems without hiding them for years.
This is the downside of the "only the paranoid survive" attitude.
Maybe after the quarterly results are latest. Got to time those puts