Intel's woes with Core i9 CPUs crashing look worse than we thought

I was seeing constant instability when running basically any large C++ build that was saturating all of the cores. I was getting odd clang segfaults indicating an AST was invalid, that would succeed on a re-run.

This was getting very frustrating, at various points I tried every other option online (including restoring bios to Intel Baseline settings), etc.

I came across Keean's investigations into the matter on the Intel forums:

> I think there is an easy solution for Intel, and that is to limit p-cores with both hyper-threads busy to 5.8GHz and allow cores with only one hyper-thread active to boost up to 5.9/6.2 they would then have a chip that matched advertised multi-core and single-thread performance, and would be stable without any specific power limits.

> I still think the real reason for this problem is that hyper-threading creates a hot-spot somewhere in the address arithmetic part of the core, and this was missed in the design of the chip. Had a thermal sensor been placed there the chip could throttle back the core ratio to remain stable automatically, or perhaps the transistors needed to be bigger for higher current - not sure that would solve the heat problem. Ultimately an extra pipeline stage might be needed, and this would be a problem, because it would slow down when only one hyper-thread is in use too. I wonder if this has something to do with why intel are getting rid hyper-threading in 15th gen?

From: https://community.intel.com/t5/Processors/14900ks-unstable/m...

Based on this, I set a P-Core limit to 5.8 in my bios and after several months of daily-use building Chromium I can say this machine is now completely stable.

If you're seeing instability on an i9 14900k or 13900k see the above forum post for more details, and try setting the all-core limit. I've now seen this fix instability in 3+ build machines we use so far.

This is going to be bad. I’ve done enough hardware diagnostics to have an intuition about this sort of thing. It’s going to be massive.

I was reading some discussion of this recently, and it seems that the common factor also seems to be overclocking and the fact that many motherboards are set up to default to overclock instead of running at the approved clock speed.

And wherever it was I read that (sorry, would link if I remembered), the people that commented that were basically shouted down by people saying that people buy these chips because they believe they're more suited to overclocking...

Personally, I've not overclocked anything since the Athlon days with the pencil mark to gain 10% trick, but I guess a lot of the hobbyists nowadays are more interested in getting the biggest number than having the most stable system, so overclocking is now the norm. The only way this can really be resolved is some official clarification as to whether overclocking is manufacturer supported or not.

Also, from TFA, if the problems persist after swapping processor, that kind of suggests a motherboard / power / settings issue to me.

I was hoping that intel would get back on track with Pat Gelsinger at the helm, but so far things have turned out to be pretty lacklustre. i9 stability issues are the last thing it needs right now.

Ever since the poor initial rollout of the i9 I've never even considered getting one. The performance/price always seemed to be better with i7. Even the i7 is a second choice for me if an AMD cpu isn't offered.

Warframe saying 80% of crash reports come from affected CPUs is horrible. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/warframe-dev...

This looks like general memory corruption generated by the CPU.

Intel is full of employees that have been in the same orgs for over a decade. At some point, these companies need to remove these people to move on