5 ms·

Intel is selling defective 13-14th Gen CPUs

162 points by signa11 2y ago

signa11 2y ago
hmm, there seems to be this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAE4NWoyMZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAE4NWoyMZk piece on gamer-nexus right now...
newzisforsukas 2y ago
https://community.intel.com/t5/Processors/June-2024-Guidance-regarding-Intel-Core-13th-and-14th-Gen-K-KF/m-p/1607807 https://community.intel.com/t5/Processors/June-2024-Guidance... I've ran a 13900K from launch, no issues.
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  I guess that proves it
  - newzisforsukas 2y ago
    They've acknowledged the issue for a long time it seems.
- newzisforsukas 2y ago
  Installed a BIOS update, and now I am using "Intel Default Settings" with the "Extreme" profile. I bought a 13900K because it was cheaper than a 13900, not because I needed to overclock. Hope this was helpful to someone else.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
darthShadow 2y ago
Related Videos: Intel has a Pretty Big Problem (by Level1Techs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAE4NWoyMZk
- NavinF 2y ago
  The Level1Techs link is a great overview of the situation and has more specific numbers from data centers. Too bad this site is allergic to videos
jeffbee 2y ago
I have my 14900K power capped at 225W/125W using RAPL and that seems to have stabilized it. I don't game with it, but it was unstable under all-core C++ compilation workloads. With these settings it is essentially a 14900. While trying to stabilize it I wasted a lot of time, bought a new motherboard, and bought all new DIMMs. I feel that if Intel can fix it they should provide owners with working replacements, a refund, and a goodwill discount on a future Intel product.
- ddtaylor 2y ago
  Has Intel ever done something like that with returns?
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    Original Pentium, similar. I didn't remember the exact details, but they tried to make owners happy. After initially bungling the response, they replaced CPUs by mail and handed out rebate coupons for retail Intel junk.
ComputerGuru 2y ago
This seems like deflection to me. There’s no reproducer, no technical info, no objective facts besides what is basically a meta study that lumps their code quality with intel’s hardware correctness as one metric. If 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.
- jandrese 2y ago
  The strangest part of the whole thing is how they claim that the CPUs will work fine initially, but then degrade over time in a deterministic way. How is nobody else seeing this? Are these guys executing code paths that are normally not used? It sounds a bit like their code is buggy in a strange way that doesn't cause problems on AMD but does on later generation Intel, but that wouldn't explain why code would work initially but fail later unless maybe the problem was brought about by a microcode update from Intel? I fully agree that demanding Intel recall all of the CPUs at this point is premature. They've done nowhere near enough research to pin the problem on the processor and not their code.
  - jchw 2y ago
    > How is nobody else seeing this? Well, ... they are. This has been being discussed for a while. It came up a bit ago, many people were seeing it in games with a weird error about low VRAM which apparently wound up being linked to Intel's 13th and 14th gen processors. Exactly why is anyone's guess. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/nvidia-blames-intel-for-gpu-vram-errors-tells-geforce-gamers-experiencing-13th-or-14th-gen-cpu-instability-to-contact-intel-support https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/nvidia-blame... Level1Techs is relatively well-trusted, and they seem to have some contacts that can also corroborate these issues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y
segasaturn 2y ago
This issue is specifically affecting Intel's K-series line, which are engineered to run up against the CPU's thermal limits. Basically, as long as there is load on the CPU and the CPU is running below 100°C, it keeps cranking up the frequency and voltage until it hits that barrier. I am quite sure that this behavior is what is causing CPU lifespan issues as pumping a theoretically unlimited amount of volts into a CPU can't be healthy. AMD is doing this performance hack on their newest AM5 Ryzen CPUs as well.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  I don’t think any of what you say is true.
  - segasaturn 2y ago
    > Intel® Thermal Velocity Boost (Intel® TVB) is a feature that opportunistically and automatically increases clock frequency above single-core and multi-core Intel® Turbo Boost Technology frequencies based on how much the processor is operating below its maximum temperature and whether turbo power budget is available https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000097061/processors.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
    - necheffa 2y ago
      TVB specifically is exclusive to the i9 product line, but K SKUs in the i7 line have also experienced a heightened occurrence of stability issues. So you kind of have to go all in on Turbo boost 3.0 as the issue and then explain why the non-K variants of the i7 and i9 don't seem to have the same frequency of occurrence.
      - doctorpangloss 2y ago
        Intel's arcane product line claims many victims.
- necheffa 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
trynumber9 2y ago
Oodle, a very optimized texture compression library used by Unreal, noted some problems months ago. 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?
- BizarroLand 2y ago
  I might be out in left field here but I think there may not be a person who currently fully understands the entire workings of modern intel chips who can then identify a root cause of the issue. There may also be some AI chip design shenanigans going on as well, which would further exacerbate the human comprehension difficulty scale.
swatcoder 2y ago
Wow, I would not make a public statement like this without narrowing down the issue and making a replication case. 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".
- eightysixfour 2y ago
  The links under the "Resources" header literally brings you to other companies and journalists confirming the issue.
  - KennyBlanken 2y ago
    [flagged]
- jeffbee 2y ago
  Your comment and the rest of these are making me imagine one of those bell curve memes: Idiot: There's something wrong with this CPU Midwit: Nooo it's never the CPU if you think it's the CPU you must be a junior dev Genius: There's something wrong with this CPU
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    That's definitely a real curve. And there could certainly be a CPU issue here. My critique is mostly about them trying to make such a strong statement about it with little specific evidence, despite not needing to make a statement at all.
more_corn 2y ago
As someone who used to spec data center hardware I assure you that AMD is going to have a series of kick ass quarters. We’ve had a slight preference for Intel for a decade but this probably is enough to flip 50% of large scale cpu purchases for the next year.
- eqvinox 2y ago
  We're not a huge company, but my employer has moved to only buying AMD a while back (a year ago or so, it was a gradual shift but it is complete now). They're just less (costly) hassle.
- hdhshdhshdjd 2y ago
  Yup, I’m having these issues and my next purchases are going to be AMD.
KennyBlanken 2y ago
This was widely covered by the tech press back in April and was common knowledge among gaming enthusiasts much earlier. Intel has been working with motherboard suppliers to leave aggressive overclocking features turned on, and it's also pretty clear they're not correctly binning their chips. For a while now Intel hasn't been "innovating", just turning up the wick. They're clearly lagging in R&D while also trying to chase the very tippy-top of gaming benchmarks which makes no sense, even for world-class competitive FPS players. 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-prone-cpu-owners-look-intel.html 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.
librasteve 2y ago
they are using the FPU heavily - in my experience an FPU design can be prone to gnarly and unpredictable bugs that are related to certain combinations of bit patterns (eg hammering all ‘1’s to all ‘0’s) in successive pipe stages which my be issued in an out of order sequence - it is very hard to diagnose and correct such failures and impossible to screen for them on a production tester
tibbydudeza 2y ago
I got a 13900 rather - not a gamer but developer so the extra bucks for K variant did not make sense to me - fortunately it seems.
wolpoli 2y ago
> 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. 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.
icf80 2y ago
This looks like general memory corruption generated by the CPU.
mikaelh2 2y ago
I've had this issue come up twice now on one server, at first i was perplexed as i simply couldn't imagine the nvme drive causing these errors. Could it be related to the 13th gen issues? https://i.imgur.com/l6vQFum.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/l6vQFum.jpeg
- necheffa 2y ago
  Not sure. But I have recently discovered that some NVMe drives do support self-tests and I was able to start and monitor the test from smartmontools, may be worth looking in to an extended self test.
NoPicklez 2y ago
Glad I bought a 13600k I don't think I should have issues?

162 points by signa11 2y ago

hmm, there seems to be this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAE4NWoyMZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAE4NWoyMZk piece on gamer-nexus right now...

newzisforsukas 2y ago

https://community.intel.com/t5/Processors/June-2024-Guidance-regarding-Intel-Core-13th-and-14th-Gen-K-KF/m-p/1607807 https://community.intel.com/t5/Processors/June-2024-Guidance... I've ran a 13900K from launch, no issues.

cjbgkagh 2y ago
I guess that proves it
- newzisforsukas 2y ago
  They've acknowledged the issue for a long time it seems.
newzisforsukas 2y ago
Installed a BIOS update, and now I am using "Intel Default Settings" with the "Extreme" profile. I bought a 13900K because it was cheaper than a 13900, not because I needed to overclock. Hope this was helpful to someone else.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

darthShadow 2y ago

Related Videos: Intel has a Pretty Big Problem (by Level1Techs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAE4NWoyMZk

NavinF 2y ago
The Level1Techs link is a great overview of the situation and has more specific numbers from data centers. Too bad this site is allergic to videos

jeffbee 2y ago

I have my 14900K power capped at 225W/125W using RAPL and that seems to have stabilized it. I don't game with it, but it was unstable under all-core C++ compilation workloads. With these settings it is essentially a 14900. While trying to stabilize it I wasted a lot of time, bought a new motherboard, and bought all new DIMMs. I feel that if Intel can fix it they should provide owners with working replacements, a refund, and a goodwill discount on a future Intel product.

ddtaylor 2y ago
Has Intel ever done something like that with returns?
- jeffbee 2y ago
  Original Pentium, similar. I didn't remember the exact details, but they tried to make owners happy. After initially bungling the response, they replaced CPUs by mail and handed out rebate coupons for retail Intel junk.

ComputerGuru 2y ago

This seems like deflection to me. There’s no reproducer, no technical info, no objective facts besides what is basically a meta study that lumps their code quality with intel’s hardware correctness as one metric. If 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.

jandrese 2y ago
The strangest part of the whole thing is how they claim that the CPUs will work fine initially, but then degrade over time in a deterministic way. How is nobody else seeing this? Are these guys executing code paths that are normally not used? It sounds a bit like their code is buggy in a strange way that doesn't cause problems on AMD but does on later generation Intel, but that wouldn't explain why code would work initially but fail later unless maybe the problem was brought about by a microcode update from Intel? I fully agree that demanding Intel recall all of the CPUs at this point is premature. They've done nowhere near enough research to pin the problem on the processor and not their code.
- jchw 2y ago
  > How is nobody else seeing this? Well, ... they are. This has been being discussed for a while. It came up a bit ago, many people were seeing it in games with a weird error about low VRAM which apparently wound up being linked to Intel's 13th and 14th gen processors. Exactly why is anyone's guess. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/nvidia-blames-intel-for-gpu-vram-errors-tells-geforce-gamers-experiencing-13th-or-14th-gen-cpu-instability-to-contact-intel-support https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/nvidia-blame... Level1Techs is relatively well-trusted, and they seem to have some contacts that can also corroborate these issues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzHcrbT5D_Y

segasaturn 2y ago

This issue is specifically affecting Intel's K-series line, which are engineered to run up against the CPU's thermal limits. Basically, as long as there is load on the CPU and the CPU is running below 100°C, it keeps cranking up the frequency and voltage until it hits that barrier. I am quite sure that this behavior is what is causing CPU lifespan issues as pumping a theoretically unlimited amount of volts into a CPU can't be healthy. AMD is doing this performance hack on their newest AM5 Ryzen CPUs as well.

doctorpangloss 2y ago
I don’t think any of what you say is true.
- segasaturn 2y ago
  > Intel® Thermal Velocity Boost (Intel® TVB) is a feature that opportunistically and automatically increases clock frequency above single-core and multi-core Intel® Turbo Boost Technology frequencies based on how much the processor is operating below its maximum temperature and whether turbo power budget is available https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000097061/processors.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
  - necheffa 2y ago
    TVB specifically is exclusive to the i9 product line, but K SKUs in the i7 line have also experienced a heightened occurrence of stability issues. So you kind of have to go all in on Turbo boost 3.0 as the issue and then explain why the non-K variants of the i7 and i9 don't seem to have the same frequency of occurrence.
    - doctorpangloss 2y ago
      Intel's arcane product line claims many victims.
necheffa 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

trynumber9 2y ago

Oodle, a very optimized texture compression library used by Unreal, noted some problems months ago. 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?

BizarroLand 2y ago
I might be out in left field here but I think there may not be a person who currently fully understands the entire workings of modern intel chips who can then identify a root cause of the issue. There may also be some AI chip design shenanigans going on as well, which would further exacerbate the human comprehension difficulty scale.

swatcoder 2y ago

Wow, I would not make a public statement like this without narrowing down the issue and making a replication case. 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".

eightysixfour 2y ago
The links under the "Resources" header literally brings you to other companies and journalists confirming the issue.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  [flagged]
jeffbee 2y ago
Your comment and the rest of these are making me imagine one of those bell curve memes: Idiot: There's something wrong with this CPU Midwit: Nooo it's never the CPU if you think it's the CPU you must be a junior dev Genius: There's something wrong with this CPU
- swatcoder 2y ago
  That's definitely a real curve. And there could certainly be a CPU issue here. My critique is mostly about them trying to make such a strong statement about it with little specific evidence, despite not needing to make a statement at all.

more_corn 2y ago

As someone who used to spec data center hardware I assure you that AMD is going to have a series of kick ass quarters. We’ve had a slight preference for Intel for a decade but this probably is enough to flip 50% of large scale cpu purchases for the next year.

eqvinox 2y ago
We're not a huge company, but my employer has moved to only buying AMD a while back (a year ago or so, it was a gradual shift but it is complete now). They're just less (costly) hassle.
hdhshdhshdjd 2y ago
Yup, I’m having these issues and my next purchases are going to be AMD.

KennyBlanken 2y ago

This was widely covered by the tech press back in April and was common knowledge among gaming enthusiasts much earlier. Intel has been working with motherboard suppliers to leave aggressive overclocking features turned on, and it's also pretty clear they're not correctly binning their chips. For a while now Intel hasn't been "innovating", just turning up the wick. They're clearly lagging in R&D while also trying to chase the very tippy-top of gaming benchmarks which makes no sense, even for world-class competitive FPS players. 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-prone-cpu-owners-look-intel.html 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.

librasteve 2y ago

they are using the FPU heavily - in my experience an FPU design can be prone to gnarly and unpredictable bugs that are related to certain combinations of bit patterns (eg hammering all ‘1’s to all ‘0’s) in successive pipe stages which my be issued in an out of order sequence - it is very hard to diagnose and correct such failures and impossible to screen for them on a production tester

tibbydudeza 2y ago

I got a 13900 rather - not a gamer but developer so the extra bucks for K variant did not make sense to me - fortunately it seems.

wolpoli 2y ago

> 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. 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.

icf80 2y ago

This looks like general memory corruption generated by the CPU.

mikaelh2 2y ago

I've had this issue come up twice now on one server, at first i was perplexed as i simply couldn't imagine the nvme drive causing these errors. Could it be related to the 13th gen issues? https://i.imgur.com/l6vQFum.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/l6vQFum.jpeg

necheffa 2y ago
Not sure. But I have recently discovered that some NVMe drives do support self-tests and I was able to start and monitor the test from smartmontools, may be worth looking in to an extended self test.

NoPicklez 2y ago

Glad I bought a 13600k I don't think I should have issues?