Intel says 13th and 14th Gen mobile CPUs are crashing

Its absurd this is still going on 6 months after the story first broke and we are really none the wiser. With estimates of 10-25% of CPUs impacted from the desktop side it seems likely all the CPUs are going to fail (including mine). They can't even recall and replace products yet as the problem isn't known. I sure hope Intel isn't just hiding the cause when its known all along because that is going to turn into big lawsuits across the world.

I hear a lot of anecdotes and noise from YouTubers around this but little to no actual data or analysis. I am a skeptic until I see concrete data. That covers both the mobile and desktop issues.

Observations so far are limited to:

I have seen actual evidence that some W680 boards have been shipping with an unlimited power profile which will toast a CPU fairly quickly. As to who’s fault that is and if this correlates or is casual to the rest of the reports I don’t know.

My own Asus B760M board shipped with an unlimited power profile. I had to switch it to “Intel Default”. This machine has been under heavy load with no issues so far.

When I have done research I have only found people reporting this on custom build systems or low balling “servers”. I haven’t found any viable big brand system failure reports yet (Dell/HP/Lenovo etc). While some of this might be statistical failures I’d like to see configuration eliminated from the data as a cause first.

I think it would be rather nice at this point if Intel produced their own desktop boards again with their own tested BIOS. So we have something viable to compare against a reference system rather than the usual ugly junk shifter outfits or big brands. A fully vertically integrated component PC would be a nice thing to have again. They just worked!

The desktop CPU issues were discussed earlier here[1] and here[2]. This is something else entirely, or so they say...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40946644

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39478551

There was a prediction from 2016 that things would get much worse for CPU bugs starting with Skylake:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16058920

It seems that article was updated with this one too.

A few years ago, if you said you buy AMD, people would think you are hallucinating, but now it looks like it's the only reliable vendor for x64. Intel was once the king of reliability, but in the last years, it looks like the king of bugs.

Ah but only due to a broad range of hardware and software issues, not because of the same hardware issue killing the desktop equivalents, so that's good news.

ECC RAM would have probably helped, but that got axed in consumer CPUs probably due to financial optimizations. They wanted to have ECC as an upsell feature for 'server grade' products.

That was pretty short sighted.

I think I'm fine, my backup laptop is 12th gen... So should be fine. Still amazing that it is two generations. Problems were not noted or even considered already with 13th...

Having put together an i7-12900k rig on a z690 six months ago, two observations -

* DDR5 is wildly different from previous generations in being much less stable with more DIMMs, due to timing synchronization sensitivity. With four 6000 sticks I just flat out can't get more than a 12 hour stable prime95, even at jedec-4800 certified speeds. I can't even boot at 6000. My first few months were plagued with random crashes minutes into loading a game.

* There is a consensus that we're operating at & beyond the limit of this consumer ATX platform's TDP. There are recognized limitations in the motherboard retention mechanism that has prompted the use of aftermarket shims. Only the very top of the line largest air heatsinks are practical, and even then you spend much of the time thermally limited. Daring people regularly prove that the heatspreader is a limiting factor by going back to bare die cooling and getting five or ten degrees of advantage.

Because of the temp throttling becoming a normal state rather than an emergency protection, better cooling translates directly into higher performance.

Intel 13th gen and 14th gen were supposedly very similar, with slight thermal improvements from the process node.

The original post is more informative:

https://www.radgametools.com/oodleintel.htm

> Intel 13900K and 14900K processors, less likely 13700, 14700 and other related processors as well

Is anyone who knows about this still buying Intel? Seems like taking quite a risk.

I’ve experienced this with the extremely weird but cool intel compute cards: https://cdrdv2-public.intel.com/780985/nuc-13-compute-elemen...

Running a test linux build, 1/5 times it will crash/reboot mid test. :(

Hmm I was considering buying the Lattepanda Sigma for a project, but seeing it's a 13th gen mobile i5-1340P... err maybe not. It is a shame though, it's beefier than any ARM board and AMD doesn't seem to bother doing SBC integrations for some reason. I guess they hate money.

I believe this was what caused sudden system instabilities on my 13600kf. I even undervolted my chip (lite load 1) when I got it, things ran fine for years until just a few weeks ago when I started hard freezing. I ended up disabling XMP which "fixed" it.

So lucky I opted for an i7 13850 in my new thinkpad and instead put the cash towards the RTX 3500. Doing large language models on the go, on GPU... and on Qubes OS no doubt... simply amazing.

Cant wait to learn what else Intel manufactured in same fab using same processes. Any of their GPUs? FPGAs? FPGAs that went into military stuff?

no reason to buy any intel products until they admit there's a problem here

I've long switched to AMD for my laptops and desktops. All work just fine

And here I just bought a laptop with a 13900HX...

How do I tell what gen CPU are in the laptops? Intel's naming scheme is confusing and and is no better