3 ms·

The article is a bit unclear on whether this happens with standard/default settings, tough that's probably because they don't know themselves. The workarounds

The article is a bit unclear on whether this happens with standard/default settings, tough that's probably because they don't know themselves. The workarounds changing things from "Auto" to "disabled" or even increasing voltage settings certainly seems like it also applies with defaults, and isn't some overclocking/tuning side effect. If that is the case… ouch.

yetihehe 3y ago
It seems like it happens only on some select cpu specimens (apparently works after replacing cpu with another one of the same model), so probably a small binning failure?
- eqvinox 3y ago
  I'm not sure I would call a binning failure "small" — mostly because I can't remember this ever happening before. Binning is a core aspect of managing yields. And it seems that this is breaking for a sufficient number of people to have a game tooling vendor investigate. How many bug reports would it take to get them into action?
  - rygorous 3y ago
    Person who actually did the investigation here. It took exactly one bug report. RAD/Epic Games Tools is a small B2B company. Oodle has one person working full-time on it, namely me, and I do coding, build/release engineering, docs, tech support, the works. There's no multiple support tiers or anything like that, all issues go straight into my inbox. Oodle Data in particular is a lossless data compression API and many customers use two entry points total, "compress" and "decompress". I get a single-digit number of support requests in any given month, most of which is actually covered in the docs and takes me all of 5 minutes to resolve to the customer's satisfaction. The 3-4 actual bug reports I get in any given year, I will investigate.
- wmf 3y ago
  This is the usual silicon lottery. Every chip will work at stock settings. Some will be stable when overclocked and some won't.
scrlk 3y ago
This sounds like motherboard manufacturers pushing aggressive OOTB performance settings, likely in excess of the Intel spec.
- eqvinox 3y ago
  That's… an assumption. At least 3 motherboard vendors are affected, and going by the Gigabyte/MSI workarounds at the end of the article, it looks like things need to be adjusted away from Intel defaults. …it'll need a statement from Intel for some clarity on this…
  - scrlk 3y ago
    > "Intel's default maximum TDP for the 13900K is 253 watts, though it can easily consume 300 watts or more when given a higher power limit. In our testing, manually setting the power limit to 275–300 watts and the amperage limit to 350A, proved to be perfectly stable for our 13900K. That required going into the advanced CPU settings in the BIOS to change the PL1/PL2 limits — called short and long duration power limits in our particular case. The motherboard's default "Auto" power and current limits meanwhile created instability issues — which correspond to a power limit of 4,096 watts and 4,096 amps." [0] The motherboard manufacturers are setting default/auto power and current limits that are way outside of Intel's specs (253 W, 307 A) [1]. [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/is-your-intel-core-i9-13900k-crashing-in-games-your-motherboard-bios-settings-may-be-to-blame-other-high-end-intel-cpus-also-affected https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/is-your-inte... [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/743844/13th-generation-intel-core-and-intel-core-14th-generation-processors-datasheet-volume-1-of-2.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/7438... (see pg. 98 and 184, the 13900K/14900K is 8P + 16E 125 W)
    - eqvinox 3y ago
      Your [0] also says: > It's not exactly clear why the 13900K suffers from these instability problems, and how exactly downclocking, lowering the power/current limits, and undervolting prevent further crashes. Clearly, something is going wrong with some CPUs. Are they "defective" or merely not capable of running the out of spec settings used by many motherboards?
rygorous 3y ago
(I'm Oodle maintainer and did most of this investigation.) For the majority of systems "in the wild", I don't know. We had two people with affected machines contact us and consent to do some testing for us, and in both cases the issue still reproduced after resetting the BIOS settings to defaults.

yetihehe 3y ago

It seems like it happens only on some select cpu specimens (apparently works after replacing cpu with another one of the same model), so probably a small binning failure?

eqvinox 3y ago
I'm not sure I would call a binning failure "small" — mostly because I can't remember this ever happening before. Binning is a core aspect of managing yields. And it seems that this is breaking for a sufficient number of people to have a game tooling vendor investigate. How many bug reports would it take to get them into action?
- rygorous 3y ago
  Person who actually did the investigation here. It took exactly one bug report. RAD/Epic Games Tools is a small B2B company. Oodle has one person working full-time on it, namely me, and I do coding, build/release engineering, docs, tech support, the works. There's no multiple support tiers or anything like that, all issues go straight into my inbox. Oodle Data in particular is a lossless data compression API and many customers use two entry points total, "compress" and "decompress". I get a single-digit number of support requests in any given month, most of which is actually covered in the docs and takes me all of 5 minutes to resolve to the customer's satisfaction. The 3-4 actual bug reports I get in any given year, I will investigate.
wmf 3y ago
This is the usual silicon lottery. Every chip will work at stock settings. Some will be stable when overclocked and some won't.

scrlk 3y ago

This sounds like motherboard manufacturers pushing aggressive OOTB performance settings, likely in excess of the Intel spec.

eqvinox 3y ago
That's… an assumption. At least 3 motherboard vendors are affected, and going by the Gigabyte/MSI workarounds at the end of the article, it looks like things need to be adjusted away from Intel defaults. …it'll need a statement from Intel for some clarity on this…
- scrlk 3y ago
  > "Intel's default maximum TDP for the 13900K is 253 watts, though it can easily consume 300 watts or more when given a higher power limit. In our testing, manually setting the power limit to 275–300 watts and the amperage limit to 350A, proved to be perfectly stable for our 13900K. That required going into the advanced CPU settings in the BIOS to change the PL1/PL2 limits — called short and long duration power limits in our particular case. The motherboard's default "Auto" power and current limits meanwhile created instability issues — which correspond to a power limit of 4,096 watts and 4,096 amps." [0] The motherboard manufacturers are setting default/auto power and current limits that are way outside of Intel's specs (253 W, 307 A) [1]. [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/is-your-intel-core-i9-13900k-crashing-in-games-your-motherboard-bios-settings-may-be-to-blame-other-high-end-intel-cpus-also-affected https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/is-your-inte... [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/743844/13th-generation-intel-core-and-intel-core-14th-generation-processors-datasheet-volume-1-of-2.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/7438... (see pg. 98 and 184, the 13900K/14900K is 8P + 16E 125 W)
  - eqvinox 3y ago
    Your [0] also says: > It's not exactly clear why the 13900K suffers from these instability problems, and how exactly downclocking, lowering the power/current limits, and undervolting prevent further crashes. Clearly, something is going wrong with some CPUs. Are they "defective" or merely not capable of running the out of spec settings used by many motherboards?

rygorous 3y ago

(I'm Oodle maintainer and did most of this investigation.) For the majority of systems "in the wild", I don't know. We had two people with affected machines contact us and consent to do some testing for us, and in both cases the issue still reproduced after resetting the BIOS settings to defaults.