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Intel says 13th and 14th Gen mobile CPUs are crashing
- nklhlk 2y ago[dead]
- JonChesterfield 2y agoAh 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.
- bayindirh 2y agoWhen your processor is cooking itself to death, all bets are off. We have seen some of them in our data center over the years, albeit very rarely. Interestingly, a modern processor is very resilient against losing its functional blocks during operation. While this is a boon, diagnosing these problems is a bit too complicated for the inexperienced.
- TomatoCo 2y ago> a modern processor is very resilient against losing its functional blocks during operation I'm very curious, can you elaborate on that?
- echoangle 2y agoI’m not sure sure if that’s what they meant, but generally, CPUs will throttle or shut down if they detect overtemp, hopefully before they start encountering errors which lead to wrong calculation results/crashes.
- bayindirh 2y agoAn x86 processor can detect when it makes a serious error in some pipelines and rerun these steps until things go right. This is the first line of recovery (this is why temperature spikes start to happen when a CPU reaches its overclocking limits. It starts to make mistakes and this mechanism kicks in). Also x86 has something called “machine check architecture” which constantly monitors the system and the CPU and throws “Machine Check Exceptions” when something goes very wrong. These exceptions divide into “recoverable” and “unrecoverable” exceptions. An unrecoverable exception generally triggers a kernel panic, and recoverable ones are logged in system logs. Moreover, a CPU can lose (fry) some caches (e.g.: half of L1), and it’ll boot with whatever available, and report what it can access and address. In some extreme cases, it loses its FPU or vector units, and instead of getting upset, it tries to do the operations at microcode level or with whatever units available. This manifests as extremely low LINPACK numbers. We had a couple of these, but I didn’t run accuracy tests on these specimens, but LINPACK didn’t say anything about the results. Just the performance was very low when compared to normal processors. Throttling is a normal defense against poor cooling. Above mechanisms try to keep the processor operational in limp mode, so you can diagnose and migrate somehow.
- markus_zhang 2y agoThanks. How did you know all of these? I guess working in data center does have its boon and curse.
- bayindirh 2y agoActually it has accumulated over years. First being interested in hardware itself, and following the overclocking scene (and doing my own experiments), then my job as an HPC administrator allowed me to touch a lot of systems. Trying to drive them to max performance without damaging them resulted in seeing lots of edge cases over the years. On top of that, I was always interested in high performance / efficient computing and did my M.Sc. and Ph.D. in related subjects. It's not impossible to gather this knowledge, but it's a lot of rabbit holes which are a bit hard to find sometimes.
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- Sakos 2y agoBased on Intel's behavior so far and the previous comment by Alderon Games' founder, I'm not sure why you're so willing to believe them at face value. > "The laptops crash in the exact same way as the desktop parts including workloads under Unreal Engine, decompression, ycruncher or similar. Laptop chips we have seen failing include but not limited to 13900HX etc.," Cassells said. > "Intel seems to be down playing the issues here most likely due to the expensive costs related to BGA rework and possible harm to OEMs and Partners," he continued. "We have seen these crashes on Razer, MSI, Asus Laptops and similar used by developers in our studio to work on the game. The crash reporting data for my game shows a huge amount of laptops that could be having issues."
- JonChesterfield 2y agoI'm totally willing to believe they're experiencing a broad range of hardware and software issues :)
- PaulKeeble 2y agoIts 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.
- kingsleyopara 2y agoCompletely agree. The lack of clarity around all this is hardly confidence inspiring. Definitely seems like a good time to be considering AMD or Qualcomm.
- yellowapple 2y agoIt does indeed make me glad I've opted to pick AMD over Intel for my recent computer purchases (at least of the x86-64 variety).
- Sparkyte 2y agoI've been using AMD since 2004. My first AMD processor was the Athlon 64 3000+, I was a kid I wasn't really allowed anything too expensive. We had dominately used Intel upt that point but when 64bit CPUs hit it was a revolutionary thing. The roughest era of AMD CPUs was the FX era. While it was comprable to its mid-range competition it was alos a sure fast way to burn down your house with its power draw. Ryzen was a huge step forward in CPU design and architecture. I see this era as Intel's FX era, if they have the right leadership in place they can turn the boat around and innovate.
- SmellTheGlove 2y agoThe funny part is that those FX processors were max 125w TDP. No different than today really.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
- Ekaros 2y agoI 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...
- saltminer 2y ago> Still amazing that it is two generations. The 14th gen is so similar to the 13th gen, Intel took a lot of heat for it in the initial reviews. It's no surprise that they both suffer the same ails.
- wtallis 2y agoIt's not similar. It's literally the same silicon. They didn't tape out any new dies for the products branded as "14th gen"; not even a new stepping. Just minor tweaks to the binning.
- 79a6ed87 2y agoI didn’t know that. I would like to know how to get more informed about these kind of structural differences on CPU generations. Going back to the what you said, Intel selling the same silicon as two different generations (even if this is still just marketing terminology) is a bit lame on their side.
- icelancer 2y agoCheck the CPU benchmarks between 13th and 14th gen. There is virtually no difference in single threaded workloads at the top.
- magicalhippo 2y agoThe 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40946644 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39478551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39478551
- metadat 2y agoThanks! Macro-expanded: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40946644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40946644 — Intel is selling defective 13-14th Gen CPUs — July 2024 (84 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39478551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39478551 — Intel Processor Instability Causing Oodle Decompression Failures — March 2024 (254 comments)
- moffkalast 2y agoHmm 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.
- omnimus 2y agoYou can get something with N100 processor.
- moffkalast 2y agoYeah that would be the Delta, but it's significantly slower (~6 times at multicore). The N100 is just a 9th gen Celeron after all. I'm more or less looking for a complete powerhouse in a smaller than ITX form factor for extremely compute intensive multithreaded stuff.
- tracker1 2y agoYou can do a mini-pc with up to a Ryzen 9 8945HS. Which at 65-85W is a bit of a beast, as far as 8-cores goes on the sub-itx size. The 8(8|9)4(0|5)H(S) are all pretty good options though. Just got a Beelink SER8 (8845HS) for Chimera, and it's been running very nicely.
- _huayra_ 2y agoThe N100 is great, hopefully not affected by this problem though I'm not sure yet. It sips power and I've really liked it for homelab use where memory and IO are more important than core count (because most of the times things are idle, but one wants to keep VMs in memory and oversub the cores).
- Medox 2y agoOr something with an N97, which performs better but is less power efficient. e.g. the new Odroid H4's
- stevenhuang 2y agoI 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.
- mapt 2y agoHaving 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.
- immibis 2y agoI have an AMD Threadripper 7000 system with DDR5 ECC registered RAM, one stick per channel (maximum) and I've noticed that one corrected bit error is logged every few hours.
- aspenmayer 2y agoIf you have memory errors, you can corrupt your OS during and/or after install time, which may explain some of your instability. Memory errors must be resolved prior to OS installation for any kind of expectations of problem-free usage.
- userbinator 2y agoAn overnight run of memtest86+ with all the tests enabled (including the RowHammer ones) is necessary to verify RAM correctness. I wonder if the latter is related to this somehow.
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- yread 2y agoThe original post is more informative: https://www.radgametools.com/oodleintel.htm https://www.radgametools.com/oodleintel.htm > Intel 13900K and 14900K processors, less likely 13700, 14700 and other related processors as well
- andix 2y agoIs anyone who knows about this still buying Intel? Seems like taking quite a risk.
- chad1n 2y agoA 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.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agox64 or x86_64 or AMD64?
- PartiallyTyped 2y agoThat was around 6-7 years ago at this point. Personally, every AMD machine I've had since then was very stable on Linux with an NVDA gpu. My latest one, an intel + NVDA, had issues under virtually all linux distros I had tried. Now that I don't need CUDA anymore I might consider going full team red.
- 79a6ed87 2y agoI would say that the AMD preferability came along with Meltdown
- hulitu 2y ago> A few years ago, if you said you buy AMD, people would think you are hallucinating I always bought AMD. You have to look at the (actual) numbers. AMD was looking bad in some benchmarks due to the icc issue but the price was just better. Intel has (had) some good stuff, but it was very expensive.
- buildbot 2y agoI’ve experienced this with the extremely weird but cool intel compute cards: https://cdrdv2-public.intel.com/780985/nuc-13-compute-element-product-brief.pdf https://cdrdv2-public.intel.com/780985/nuc-13-compute-elemen... Running a test linux build, 1/5 times it will crash/reboot mid test. :(
- teeheelol 2y agoI 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!
- fotcorn 2y agoGamers Nexus is talking to one big PC manufacturer (my guess is Dell) that is seeing failure rates of 10-25% for specific SKUs: https://youtu.be/gTeubeCIwRw?t=527&si=YzpDzI2IyadzQYid https://youtu.be/gTeubeCIwRw?t=527&si=YzpDzI2IyadzQYid Not fully confirmed yet, but that sounds really bad. It seems like it also hits low power models like the 13900T, which would imply this isn't just a voltage issue from auto overclocking.
- userbinator 2y agoThere was a prediction from 2016 that things would get much worse for CPU bugs starting with Skylake: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16058920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16058920 It seems that article was updated with this one too.
- DaoVeles 2y agoI used to say, 'Never bet against Intel' but the last 5-10 years or so have not been kind to them. They have been kicking out the supports in the name of efficiency and we are seeing the impacts of this now. Same issue that is plaguing Boeing. MBA is now a swear word.
- bornfreddy 2y agoI think they have a chance to escape the Boeing destiny, though? With Gelsinger the "technical reign" returned to the company, if I understand correctly?
- IAmNotACellist 2y agoAnd here I just bought a laptop with a 13900HX...
- BizarroLand 2y ago13950hx here
- blibble 2y agono reason to buy any intel products until they admit there's a problem here
- rustcleaner 2y agoNice! This means some sweet "We're sorry, please come back to us" discounts will be on the menu next year!
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoHow do I tell what gen CPU are in the laptops? Intel's naming scheme is confusing and and is no better
- jacooper 2y agoIt's pretty obvious Intel iX-13XX = 13th Gen Intel iX-14XX = 14th gen
- dankwizard 2y agoBut even that's confusing because 14th gen is still using 13th gen technology, it isn't a true "next gen"
- dagmx 2y agoThat’s not really confusing because the title says it affects 13th and 14th. You don’t need to know anything beyond that.
- FpUser 2y agoI've long switched to AMD for my laptops and desktops. All work just fine
- rustcleaner 2y agoSo 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.
- rasz 2y agoCant wait to learn what else Intel manufactured in same fab using same processes. Any of their GPUs? FPGAs? FPGAs that went into military stuff?
- luckystarr 2y agoECC 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.
- wongogue 2y agoDoesn’t DDR5 memory have some kind of error correction? Is the error rate different on DDR4 and DDR5 setups?
- wtallis 2y agoDDR5 (and any other DRAM build on the latest fab processes for DRAM) has on-die ECC which provides some protection against corruption of data at rest. It's necessary because the density of the memory array is too high; there's not enough isolation between memory cells and not enough charge stored in each cell to ensure sufficiently low error rates without adding the on-die ECC. A typical DDR5 chip might be less susceptible to random bit-flips or rowhammer than a typical DDR4 chip, but the on-die ECC is really only intended to prevent a major regression in reliability. What ordinary consumer DDR5 modules still lack is any form of ECC on the link between the DRAM and the CPU's memory controller. With the link running at about twice the speed used by DDR4, DDR5 is much more challenging for the memory controller/PHY to handle.