Intel is selling defective 13-14th Gen CPUs
Intel faces criticism from Alderon Games for selling defective 13th and 14th gen CPUs causing crashes, instability, and memory corruption. Alderon Games advises against using Intel CPUs for hosting, migrating to AMD. They urge Intel to recall and refund affected consumers.
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Intel is facing criticism from Alderon Games for selling defective 13th and 14th generation CPUs. The issues reported include crashes, instability, and memory corruption, affecting various aspects of game development and server hosting. Alderon Games has observed a high failure rate in these CPUs over time, leading them to migrate their servers to AMD processors. They are also advising against using the problematic Intel CPUs for hosting game servers. The company is taking steps to inform users about the issue through in-game notifications. The issue has gained attention from news outlets and other companies like Fortnite and RAD Game Tools. Alderon Games hopes Intel will recall the faulty CPUs and refund consumers. The situation highlights the importance of addressing product defects promptly to prevent further harm to users.
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19 commentsIf it’s as they say, switching to AMD shouldn’t lead to 100x fewer crashes, it should lead to no crashes.
Lumping both 13th and 14th gen hardware together makes it harder to take the claims as easily at face value. 13th gen have been around long enough that you’d think they’d be able to dig up a kernel mailing list bug report or some other corroboration of their accusation.
I clicked expecting basically an undocumented errata with specific, 100% reproducible instructions and a deep dive into the internal architecture changes that could have caused this. I’m tempted to flag the submission, honestly. Claims of such magnitude demand at least some baseline evidence.
Intel has a Pretty Big Problem (by Level1Techs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y
Intel's CPUs Are Failing, ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs (by Gamers Nexus): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAE4NWoyMZk
It is a bit odd that after months of this being well-known problem Intel still hasn't released a root cause. Is it an instruction sequence? Is their code subtly wrong in a way that works sometimes on these chips but always on other chips? Are some processors defective?
That's a really high bar for a non-Intel investigation. The Pentium III 1.13GHz issue 24 years ago had 100% reproduceable instruction, but even that didn't include any deep dive into the internal architecture because that just isn't information that people have.
Nvidia's been flat out telling people complaining about games crashing on 13th and 14th gen CPUs to 'talk to Intel':
https://www.techspot.com/news/102611-nvidia-advises-crash-pr...
If you overlooked Ryzen because of issues like memory latency in the early days, I encourage looking at them again. If you do your homework, you can find motherboards that support ECC ram to varying degrees (ie from "it'll run but with ECC disabled" to "error correcting but doesn't report it" to "full support, just not listed as such".) I believe AM4-socket ECC support is much more prevalent, if that's important to you.
Familiarize yourself with AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive, which can be used for overclocking and/or undervolting. Unlike AMD's graphics cards (which are space heaters, though the current 7xxx series is an improvement), Ryzen processors are fairly efficient in stock form; more so if you do even a bit of mild undervolting.
Don't waste your time with the stock coolers supplied with any of the chips. They'll keep the chip cool enough, but are noisy as hell compared to a well-performing $30 dual-fan air cooler (GamersNexus has found several in their reviews.)
Keep your BIOS up to date for AGESA (AMD microcode) improvements, and keep your AMD chipset drivers up to date as well.
I don't think I should have issues?
I've ran a 13900K from launch, no issues.
Given what little insight they have now, the crash-triggering fault could just as likely be in the peculiarities of their own code, some flaw in their build toolchain, some flaw in a runtime library, etc
With all respect to the folks at this studio, this statement reads like a junior dev throwing up their arms and blaming others over a bug they can't wrap their head around.
Even if they have a hunch that it's a CPU bug and can't afford to prove it, a more professional approach would be to perform the hardware change to AMD and toss out a more curious and less authoritative statement -- "Anybody else seeing more crashes on these processors? Have you figured out what from?" vs "These are broken and should be recalled".
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