Silicon chips degrading under high temperature and voltage is very well known. "Overclocking" was (is?) the game of deliberately turning CPU frequency up to get

Silicon chips degrading under high temperature and voltage is very well known. "Overclocking" was (is?) the game of deliberately turning CPU frequency up to get better performance, and turning voltage up to get stable performance, while trying to keep the chip cool enough for this to broadly work out. If you push the envelope a bit hard the stable overclock becomes unstable over time and turning down the voltage and frequency can make it stable again. That behaviour is pretty well documented. Happens to memory too. When you draw more current - i.e. make the chip do work - the voltage drops. "Load line calibration" was introduced as a way to crank the applied voltage up as the chip worked harder to offset this. Alternatively phrased, if you set the voltage so that it works well under load, it's kind of set too high for idle, so LLC gives a way to decrease idle voltage. There was some discussion at the time about the wisdom of this. The voltage rings when you change it (overshoots), and it's not that clear whether high voltage at idle matters very much (since the chip is cooler then). I remember reading a bunch of articles, then some materials science books, then turning off LLC in the bios as probably a misfeature. The current Intel problem is they've built a reputation on being the fastest and the most reliable CPU. Then they lost fastest to chiplets at AMD, so adjusted to "fastest single core". They really didn't want to lose that too, and CPU's run faster when you push more voltage through them, so that's what they did. --- "Intel silicon degradation" currently refers to people noticing that desktop processors from the last couple of generations were degrading, despite not being overclocked. Some finger pointing there, Intel encourages motherboards to set fairly aggressive out of the box controls because it looks good under review. Also some more recent reports that mobile chips have the same behaviour. At a guess, the desktop ones have the voltage too high and the mobile ones are running at much higher temperature. Some reports are mentioning LLC which would be personally satisfying if it turns out to be the root cause. I'm waiting to see if reports of degradation start to emerge on the Xeon line. Intel is claiming there's no risk of that but they're made out of the same magic sand and under really heavy competitive pressure from the Epyc chips. They've also got rather high power consumption relative to previous generations. As to whether the same thing will hit AMD - probably not. If you take one of their chips and push the voltage up, yeah, it'll have the same degradation over time. But they're not running out of the box at the edge of feasible to try to cope with the competition because chiplets are winning the day. Also AMD doesn't have the gilded reputation of Intel to rely upon if reliability comes under question. The incentives are pointing in the opposite direction.