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floofloof ,

Intel has not halted sales or clawed back any inventory. It will not do a recall, period.

Buy AMD. Got it!

xantoxis ,

ARM looking pretty good too these days

BangelaQuirkel ,

For real?

DarkThoughts ,

No.

BangelaQuirkel ,

Why?

Gullible ,

Because optimization isn’t secondary or even tertiary to the average modern design philosophy. The extra power is, unfortunately, mandatory for a decent user experience.

Dudewitbow ,

arm is very primed to take a lot of market share of server market from intel. Amazon is already very committed on making their graviton arm cpu their main cpu, which they own a huge lion share of the server market on alone.

for consumers, arm adoption is fully reliant on the respective operating systems and compatibility to get ironed out.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Linux works great on ARM, I just want something similar to most mini-ITX boards (4x SATA, 2x mini-PCIe, and RAM slots), and I’ll convert my DIY NAS to ARM. But there just isn’t anything between RAM-limited SBCs and datacenter ARM boards.

Dudewitbow , (edited )

arm is a mixed bag. iirc atm the gpu on the Snapdragon X Elite is disabled on Linux, and consumer support is reliant on how well the hardware manufacturer supports it if it closed source driver. In the case of qualcomm, the history doesnt look great for it

sugar_in_your_tea ,

Eh, if they give me a PCIe slot, I’m happy to use that in the meantime. My current NAS uses an old NVIDIA GPU, so I’d just move that over.

Zangoose ,

Apparently (from another comment on a thread about arm from a few weeks ago) consumer GPU bioses contain some x86 instructions that get run on the CPU, so getting full support for ARM isn’t as simple as swapping the cards over to a new motherboard. There are ways to hack around it (some people got AMD GPUs booting on a raspberry pi 5 using its PCIe lanes with a bunch of adapters) but it is pretty unreliable.

icydefiance ,

Yeah, I manage the infrastructure for almost 150 WordPress sites, and I moved them all to ARM servers a while ago, because they’re 10% or 20% cheaper on AWS.

Websites are rarely bottlenecked by the CPU, so that power efficiency is very significant.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I really think that most people who think that they want ARM machines are wrong, at least given the state of things in 2024. Like, maybe you use Linux…but do you want to run x86 Windows binary-only games? Even if you can get 'em running, you’ve lost the power efficiency. What’s hardware support like? Do you want to be able to buy other components? If you like stuff like that Framework laptop, which seems popular on here, an SoC is heading in the opposite direction of that – an all-in-one, non-expandable manufacturer-specified system.

But yours is a legit application. A non-CPU-constrained datacenter application running open-source software compiled against ARM, where someone else has validated that the hardware is all good for the OS.

I would not go ARM for a desktop or laptop as things stand, though.

batshit ,

If you didn’t want to game on your laptop, would an ARM device not be better for office work? Considering they’re quiet and their battery lasts forever.

melroy ,
@melroy@kbin.melroy.org avatar

hmm. not really. I can't beat AMD. Only in power-consumption, sure, but not in real performance.

RamblingPanda ,

This is where I need it to beat the others

vikingtons ,
@vikingtons@lemmy.world avatar

even then, strix will look to compete with apple silicon in perf/watt

RamblingPanda ,

I need to have a look at that. Thanks!

frezik ,

ARM is only more power efficient below 10 to 15 W or so. Above that, doesn’t matter much between ARM and x86.

The real benefit is somewhat abstract. Only two companies can make x86, and only one of them knows how to do it well. ARM (and RISC V) opens up the market to more players.

cmnybo ,

It’s not quite there for desktop use yet, but it probably won’t be too much longer.

whostosay ,

I hope so, I accidentally advised a client to snatch up a snapdragon surface (because they had to have a dog shit surface) and I hadn’t realized that a lot of shit doesn’t quite work yet. Most of it does, which is awesome, but it needs to pick up the pace

barsoap , (edited )

Depends on the desktop. I have a NanoPC T4, originally as a set top box (that’s what the RK3399 was designed for, has a beast of a VPU) now on light server and wlan AP duty, and it’s plenty fast enough for a browser and office. Provided you give it an SSD, that is.

Speaking of Desktop though the graphics driver situation is atrocious. There’s been movement since I last had a monitor hooked up to it but let’s just say the linux blob that came with it could do gles2, while the android driver does vulkan. Presumably because ARM wants Rockchip to pay per fucking feature per OS for Mali drivers.

Oh the VPU that I mentioned? As said, a beast, decodes 4k h264 at 60Hz, very good driver support, well-documented instruction set, mpv supports it out of the box, but because the Mali drivers are shit you only get an overlay, no window system integration because it can’t paint to gles2 textures. Throwback to the 90s.

Sidenote some madlads got a dedicated GPU running on the thing. M.2 to PCIe adapter, and presumably a lot of duct tape code.

cmnybo ,

GPU support is a real mess. Those ARM SOCs are intended for embeded systems, not PCs. None of the manufacturers want to release an open source driver and the blobs typically don’t work with a recent kernel.

For ARM on the desktop, I would want an ATX motherboard with a socketed 3+ GHz CPU with 8-16 cores, socketed RAM and a PCIe slot for a desktop GPU.

Almost all Linux software will run natively on ARM if you have a working GPU. Getting windows games to run on ARM with decent performance would probably be difficult. It would probably need a CPU that’s been optimized for emulating x86 like what Apple did with theirs.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

If there were decent homelab ARM CPUs, I’d be all over that. But everything is either memory limited (e.g. max 8GB) or datacenter grade (so $$$$). I want something like a Snapdragon with 4x SATA, 2x m.2, 2+ USB-C, and support for 16GB+ RAM in a mini-ITX form factor. Give it to me for $200-400, and I’ll buy it if it can beat my current NAS in power efficiency (not hard, it’s a Ryzen 1700).

RamblingPanda ,

I’ll take that as well please.

mox OP ,

RISC-V isn’t there yet, but it’s moving in the right direction. A completely open architecture is something many of us have wanted for ages. It’s worth keeping an eye on.

henfredemars ,

Smells like a future class action lawsuit to me.

Itdidnttrickledown ,

You mean the type where the lawyers get eight figure payouts and you get a ten dollar check?

vikingtons ,
@vikingtons@lemmy.world avatar

uber eats voucher*

Lets_Eat_Grandma ,

I understood that reference.

Itdidnttrickledown ,

There are reports that the vouchers handed out were canceled before anyone could use them.

Exusia ,
@Exusia@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah that’s pretty shitty to continue to sell a part that they know is defective.

lath ,

Yet they do it all the time when a higher specs CPU is fabricated with physical defects and is then presented as a lower specs variant.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Nobody objects to binning, because people know what they’re getting and the part functions within the specified parameters.

lath ,

And so do these, under the updated parameters.

grue ,

I’ve been buying AMD for – holy shit – 25 years now, and have never once regretted it. I don’t consider myself a fanboi; I just (a) prefer having the best performance-per-dollar rather than best performance outright, and (b) like rooting for the underdog.

But if Intel keeps fucking up like this, I might have to switch on grounds of (b)!

spoiler___ (Realistically I’d be more likely to switch to ARM or even RISCV, though. Even if Intel became an underdog, my memory of their anti-competitive and anti-consumer bad behavior remains long.)

Damage ,

I’ve been on AMD and ATi since the Athlon 64 days on the desktop.

Laptops are always Intel, simply because that’s what I can find, even if every time I scour the market extensively.

Krauerking ,

Honestly I was and am, an AMD fan but if you went back a few years you would not have wanted and AMD laptop. I had one and it was truly awful.

Battery issues. Low processing power. App crashes and video playback issues. And this was on a more expensive one with a dedicated GPU…

And then Ryzen came out. You can get AMD laptops now and I mean that like they exist, but also, as they actually are nice. (Have one)

But in 2013 it was Intel or you were better off with nothing.

orangeboats ,

Indeed, the Ryzen laptops are very nice! I have one (the 4800H) and it lasts ~8 hours on battery, far more than what I expected from laptops of this performance level. My last laptop barely achieved 4 hours of battery life.

I had stability issues in the first year but after one of the BIOS updates it has been smooth as butter.

SoleInvictus ,

Same here. I hate Intel so much, I won’t even work there, despite it being my current industry and having been headhunted by their recruiter. It was so satisfying to tell them to go pound sand.

FinalRemix ,

I’ve had nothing but issues with some computers, laptops, etc… once I discovered the common factor was Intel, I haven’t had a single problem with any of my devices since. AMD all the way for CPUs.

TrickDacy ,

I’m with you on all this. Fuck Intel.

vxx ,

I hate the way Intel is going, but I’ve been using Intel chips for over 30 years and never had an issue.

So your statement is kind of pointless, since it’s such a small data set, it’s irrelevant and nothing to draw any conclusion from.

Rai ,

Sorry but after the amazing Athlon x2, the core and core 2 (then i series) lines fuckin wrecked AMD for YEARS. Ryzen took the belt back but AMD was absolutely wrecked through the core and i series.

Source: computer building company and also history

tl:dr: AMD sucked ass for value and performance between core 2 and Ryzen, then became amazing again after Ryzen was released.

Telorand ,

Don’t worry. I’m sure the $10 Doordash card is coming to an inbox near you!

humancrayon ,
@humancrayon@sh.itjust.works avatar

Aaaaaand it’s been cancelled by the issuing party.

tgxn ,
@tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net avatar

Thanks, Crowdstrike.

sunzu ,

We are giving this failed management team billions of dollars to build "us" a fab

🤡🤡🤡

jonne ,

Even worse, there were no conditions to the funding. They just wrote a check.

sunzu ,

damn... can you provide more context.

watch end up like nation wide broadband lol

never built and patchy bullshit we did get we get price gouged and dissed by comcast and co

whostosay ,

Profit over everything is involved, it will happen. Although if they kill it with the development, they will have so much more later. They just cannot do it though, short term money go brrrr.

henfredemars ,

Surely this will never backfire on taxpayers.

MudMan ,

I have a 13 series chip, it had some reproducible crashing issues that so far have subsided by downclocking it. It is in the window they've shared for the oxidation issue. At this point there's no reliable way of knowing to what degree I'm affected, by what type of issue, whether I should wait for the upcoming patch or reach out to see if they'll replace it.

I am not happy about it.

Obviously next time I'd go AMD, just on principle, but this isn't the 90s anymore. I could do a drop-in replacement to another Intel chip, but switching platforms is a very expensive move these days. This isn't just a bad CPU issue, this could lead to having to swap out two multi-hundred dollar componenet, at least on what should have been a solidly future-proof setup for at least five or six years.

I am VERY not happy about it.

henfredemars ,

I’m angry on your behalf. If you have to downclock the part so that it works, then you’ve been scammed. It’s fraud to sell a part as a higher performing part when it can’t deliver that performance.

MudMan ,

So here's the thing about that, the real performance I lose is... not negligible, but somewhere between 0 and 10% in most scenarios, and I went pretty hard keeping the power limits low. Once I set it up this way, realizing just how much power and heat I'm saving for the last few few drops of performance made me angrier than having to do this. The dumb performance race with all the built-in overclocking has led to these insanely power hungry parts that are super sensitive to small defects and require super aggressive cooling solutions.

I would have been fine with a part rated for 150W instead of 250 that worked fine with an air cooler. I could have chosen whether to push it. But instead here we are, with extremely expensive motherboards massaging those electrons into a firehose automatically and turning my computer into a space heater for the sake of bragging about shaving half a milisecond per frame on CounterStrike. It's absurd.

None of which changes that I got sold a bum part, Intel is fairly obviously trying to weasel out of the obviously needed recall and warranty extension and I'm suddenly on the hook for close to a grand in superfluous hardware next time I want to upgrade because my futureproof parts are apparently made of rust and happy thoughts.

tal , (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

150W instead of 250

Yeah, when I saw that the CPU could pull 250W, I initially thought that it was a misprint in the spec sheet. That is kind of a nutty number. I have a space heater that can run at low at 400W, which is getting into that range, and you can get very low-power space heaters that consume less power than the TDP on that processor. That’s an awful lot of heat to be putting into an incredibly small, fragile part.

That being said, I don’t believe that Intel intentionally passed the initial QA for the 13th generation thinking that there were problems. They probably thought there was a healthy safety margin. You can certainly blame them for insufficient QA or for how they handled the problem as the issue was ongoing, though.

And you could also have said “this is absurd” at many times in the past when other performance barriers came up. I remember – a long time ago now – when the idea of processors that needed active cooling or they would destroy themselves seemed rather alarming and fragile. I mean, fans do fail. Processors capable of at least shutting down on overheat to avoid destroying themselves, or later throttling themselves, didn’t come along until much later. But if we’d stopped with passive heatsink cooling, we’d be using far slower systems (though probably a lot quieter!)

MudMan ,

You're not wrong, but "we've been winging it for decades" is not necessarily a good defense here.

That said, I do think they did look at their performance numbers and made a conscious choice to lean into feeding these more power and running them hotter, though. Whether the impact would be lower with more conservative power specs is debatable, but as you say there are other reasons why trying to fake generational leaps by making CPUs capable of fusing helium is not a great idea.

brickfrog ,

I have a 13 series chip, it had some reproducible crashing issues that so far have subsided by downclocking it.

From the article:

the company confirmed a patch is coming in mid-August that should address the “root cause” of exposure to elevated voltage. But if your 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processor is already crashing, that patch apparently won’t fix it.

Citing unnamed sources, Tom’s Hardware reports that any degradation of the processor is irreversible, and an Intel spokesperson did not deny that when we asked.

If your CPU is already crashing then that’s it, game over. The upcoming patch cannot fix it. You’ve got to figure out if you can do a warranty replacement or continue to live with workarounds like you’re doing now.

Their retail boxed CPUs usually have a 3(?) year warranty so for a 13th gen CPU you may be midway or at the tail end of that warranty period. If it’s OEM, etc. it could be a 1 year warranty aka Intel isn’t doing anything about it unless a class action suit forces them :/

The whole situation sucks and honestly seems a bit crazy that Intel hasn’t already issued a recall or dealt with this earlier.

1rre ,

If you’re in the UK or I expect EU, I imagine if it’s due to oxidation you can get it replaced even on an expired warranty as it’s a defect which was known to either you or intel before the warranty expired, and a manufacturing defect rather than breaking from use, so intel are pretty much in a corner about having sold you faulty shit

MudMan ,

The article is... not wrong, but oversimplifying. There seem to be multiple faults at play here, some would continue to degrade, others would prevent you from recovering some performance threshold, but may be prevented from further damage, others may be solved. Yes, degradation of the chip may be irreversible, if it's due to the oxidation problem or due to the incorrect voltages having cuased damage, but presumably in some cases the chip would continue to work stable and not degenerate further with the microcode fixes.

But yes, agreed, the situation sucks and Intel should be out there disclosing a range of affected chips by at least the confirmed physical defect and allowing a streamlined recall of affected devices, not saying "start an RMA process and we'll look into it".

Lets_Eat_Grandma ,

switching platforms is a very expensive move these days.

It’s just a motherboard and a cpu. Everything else is cross compatible, likely even your cpu cooler. If you just buy another intel chip… it’s just gonna oxidize again.

$370 for a 7800x3d microcenter.com/…/amd-ryzen-7-7800x3d-raphael-am5…

~$200 for a motherboard.

Personally i’d wait for the next release to drop in a month… or until your system crashes aren’t bearable / it’s worth making the change. I just don’t see the cost as prohibitive, it’s about on par with all the alternatives. Plus you could sell your old motherboard for something.

stankmut ,

It’s just nearly $600. Practically free.

barsoap ,

I’m not really that knowledgeable about AM5 mobos (still on AM4) but you should be able to get something perfectly sensible for 100 bucks. Are you going to get as much IO and bells and whistles no but most people don’t need that stuff and you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a good VRM or traces to the DIMM slots.

Then, possibly bad news: Intel Gen 13 supports DDR4, so you might need new RAM.

MudMan ,

No, I have a DDR5 setup. Which is why my motherboard was way more expensive than 100 bucks.

The problem isn't upgrading to a entry level AM5 motherboard, the problem is that to get back to where I am with my rather expensive Intel motherboard I have to spend a lot more than that. Moving to AMD doesn't mean I want to downgrade.

MudMan ,

I mean, happy for you, but in the real world a 200 extra dollars for a 400 dollar part is a huge price spike.

Never mind that, be happy for me, I actually went for a higher spec than that when I got this PC because I figured I'd get at least one CPU upgrade out of this motherboard, since it was early days of DDR5 and it seemed like I'd be able to both buy faster RAM and a faster CPU to keep my device up to date. So yeah, it was more expensive than that.

And hey, caveat emptor, futureproofing is a risky, expensive game on PCs. I was ready for a new technology to make me upgrade anyway, if we suddenly figured out endless storage or instant RAM or whatever. Doesn't mean it isn't crappy to suddenly make upgrading my CPU almost twice as expensive because Intel sucks at their one job.

tal , (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

They do say that you can contact Intel customer support if you have an affected CPU, and that they’re replacing CPUs that have been actually damaged. I don’t know – and Intel may not know – what information or proof you need, but my guess is that it’s good odds that you can get a replacement CPU. So there probably is some level of recourse.

Now, obviously that’s still a bad situation. You’re out the time that you didn’t have a stable system, out the effort you put into diagnosing it, maybe have losses from system downtime (like, I took an out-of-state trip expecting to be able to access my system remotely and had it hang due to the CPU damage at one point), maybe out data you lost from corruption, maybe out money you spent trying to fix the problem (like, on other parts).

But I’d guess that specifically for the CPU, if it’s clearly damaged, you have good odds of being able to at least get a non-damaged replacement CPU at some point without needing to buy it. It may not perform as well as the generation had initially been benchmarked at. But it should be stable.

RootBeerGuy ,
@RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Replacing it with what exactly. Another 13/14th gen chip?

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Yeah. They can’t replace it with their upcoming 15th gen, because that uses a new, incompatible socket. They’d apparently been handing replacement CPUs out to large customers to replace failed processors, according to one of Steve Burke’s past videos on the subject.

On a motherboard that has the microcode update which they’re theoretically supposed to get out in a month or so, the processors should at least refrain from destroying themselves, though I expect that they’ll probably run with some degree of degraded performance from the update.

Just guessing, not anything Burke said, but if there’s enough demand for replacement CPUs, might also be possible that they’ll do another 14th gen production run, maybe fixing the oxidation issue this time, so that the processors could work as intended.

MudMan ,

"Clearly damaged" is an interesting problem. The CPU would crash 100% of the time on the default settings for the motherboard, but if you remember, they issued a patch already.

I patched. And guess what, with the new Intel Defaults it doesn't crash anymore. But it suddenly runs very hot instead. Like, weird hot. On a liquid cooling system it's thermal throttling when before it wouldn't come even close. Won't crash, though.

So is it human error? Did I incorrectly mount my cooling? I'd say probably not, considering it ran cool enough pre-patch until it became unstable and it runs cool enough now with a manual downclock. But is that enough for Intel to issue a replacement if the system isn't unstable? More importantly, do I want to have that fight with them now or to wait and see if their upcoming patch, which allegedly will fix whatever incorrect voltage requests the CPU is making, fixes the overheating issue? Because I work on this thing, I can't just chuck it in a box, send it to Intel and wait. I need to be up and running immediately.

So yeah, it sucks either way, but it would suck a lot less if Intel was willing to flag a range of CPUs as being eligible for a recall.

As I see it right now, the order of operations is to wait for the upcoming patch, retest the default settings after the patch and if the behavior seems incorrect contact Intel for a replacement. I just wish they would make it clearer what that process is going to be and who is eligible for one.

gravitas_deficiency ,

When did you buy it? Depending on the credit card you have, they will sometimes extend on any manufacturer warranty by a year or two. Might be worth checking.

blackwateropeth ,

Went 13th -> 14th very early in both’s launch cycles because of chronic crashing. After about swapping mobo, RAM and SSDs i finally swapped to AMD and my build from late 2022 is FINALLY stable. Wendell’s video was the catalyst to jump ship. I thought I was going crazy, but yea… it was intel

MudMan ,

Whoa, that's even worse. It's not just the uncertainty of knowing whether Intel will replace your hardware or the cost of jumping ship next time. Intel straight up owes you money. That sucks.

wingsfortheirsmiles ,

I smell a class action lawsuit brewing

residentmarchant ,

As compared to a recall and re-fitting a fab, a class action is probably the cheaper way out.

I wish companies cared about what they sold instead of picking the cheapest way out, but welcome to the world we live in.

tal , (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I mean, I’m sure Intel cares.

My problem is really in how they handled the situation once they knew that there was a problem, not even the initial manufacturing defect.

Yes, okay. They didn’t know exactly the problem, didn’t know exactly the scope, and didn’t have a fix. Fine. I get that that is a really hard problem to solve.

But they knew that there was a problem.

Putting out a list of known-affected processors and a list of known-possibly-affected processors at the earliest date would have at least let their customers do what is possible to mitigate the situation. And I personally think that they shouldn’t have been selling more of the potentially-affected processors until they’d figured out the problem sufficient to ensure that people who bought new ones wouldn’t be affected.

And I think that, at first opportunity, they should have advised customers as to what Intel planned to do, at least within the limits of certainty (e.g. if Intel can confirm that the problem is due to an Intel manufacturing or design problem, then Intel will issue a replacement to consumers who can send in affected CPUs) and what customers should do (save purchase documentation or physical CPUs).

Those are things that Intel could certainly have done but didn’t. This is the first statement they’ve made with some of that kind of information.

It might have meant that an Intel customer holds off on an upgrade to a potentially-problematic processor. Maybe those customers would have been fine taking the risk or just waiting for Intel to figure out the issue, issue an update, and make sure that they used updated systems with the affected processors. But they would have at least been going into this with their eyes open, and been able to mitigate some of the impact.

Like, I think that in general, the expectation should be that a manufacturer who has sold a product with a defect should put out what information they can to help customers mitigate the impact, even if that information is incomplete, at the soonest opportunity. And I generally don’t think that a manufacturer should sell a product with known severe defects (of the “it might likely destroy itself in a couple months” variety).

I think that one should be able to expect that a manufacturer do so even today. If there are some kind of reasons that they are not willing to do so (e.g. concerns about any statement affecting their position in potential class-action suits), I’d like regulators to restructure the rules to eliminate that misincentive. Maybe it could be a stick, like “if you don’t issue information dealing with known product defects of severity X within N days, you are exposed to strict liability”. Or a carrot, like “any information in public statements provided to consumers with the intent of mitigating harm caused by a defective product may not be introduced as evidence in class action lawsuits over the issue”. But I want manufacturers of defective products to act, not to just sit there clammed up, even if they haven’t figured out the full extent of the problem, because they are almost certainly in a better position to figure out the problem and issue information to mitigate it than their customers individually are, and in this case, Intel just silently sat there for a very long time while a lot of their customers tried to figure out the scope of what was going wrong, and often spent a lot of money trying to address the problem themselves when more information from Intel probably would have avoided them incurring some of those costs.

tal , (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

To put this another way, Intel had at least three serious failures that let the problem reach this level:

  • A manufacturing defect that led to the flawed CPUs being produced in the first place.
  • A QA failure to detect the flawed CPUs initially (or to be able to quickly narrow down the likely and certain scope of the problem once the issue arose). Not to mention having a second generation of chips with the defect go out the door, I can only assume (and hope) without QA having initially identified that they were also affected.
  • A customer care issue, in that Intel did not promptly publicly provide customers with information that Intel either had or should have had about likely scope of the problem, mitigation, and at least within some bounds of uncertainty (“if it can be proven that the problem is due to an Intel manufacturing defect on a given processor for some definition of proven, Intel will provide a replacement processor”), what Intel would do for affected customers. A lot of customers spent a lot of time replicating effort trying to diagnose and address the problem at their level, as well as continuing to buy and use the defective CPUs. It is almost certain that some of that was not necessary.

The manufacturing failure sucks, fine. But it happens. Intel’s pushing physical limits. I accept that this kind of thing is just one thing that occasionally happens when you do that. Obviously not great, but it happens. This was an especially bad defect, but it’s within the realm of what I can understand and accept. AMD just recalled an initial batch of new CPUs (albeit way, way earlier in the generation than Intel)…they dicked something up too.

I still don’t understand how the QA failure happened to the degree that it did. Like, yes, it was a hard problem to identify, since it was progressive degradation that took some time to arise, and there were a lot of reasons for other components to potentially be at fault. And CPUs are a fast moving market. You can’t try running a new gen of CPU for weeks or months prior to shipping, maybe. But for Intel to not have identified that they had a problem with the 13th gen at least within certain parameters at least subsequent to release and then to have not held up the 14th gen until it was definitely addressed seems unfathomable to me. Like, does Intel not have a number of CPUs that they just keep hot and running to see if there are aging problems? Surely that has to be part of their QA process, right? I used to work for another PC component manufacturer and while I wasn’t involved in it, I know that they definitely did that as part of their QA process.

But as much as I think that that QA failure should not have happened, it pales in comparison to the customer care failure.

Like, there were Intel customers who kept building systems with components that Intel knew or should have known were defective. Far a long time, Intel did not promptly issue a public warning saying “we know that there is a problem with this product”. They did not pull known defective components from the market, which means that customers kept sinking money into them (and resources trying to diagnose and otherwise resolve the issues). Intel did not issue a public statement about the likely-affected components, even though they were probably in the best position to know. Again, they let customers keep building them into systems. They did not issue a statement as to what Intel would do (and I’m not saying that Intel has to conclusively determine that this is an Intel problem, but at least say “if this is shown to be an Intel defect, then we will provide a replacement for parts proven to be defective due to this cause”). They did not issue a statement telling Intel customers what to do to qualify for any such program. Those are all things that I am confident that Intel could have done much earlier and which would have substantially reduced how bad this incident was for their customers. Instead, their customers were left in isolation to try to figure out the problems individually and come up with mitigations themselves. In many cases, manufacturers of other parts were blamed, and money spent buying components unnecessarily, or trying to run important services on components that Intel knew or should have known were potentially defective. Like, I expect Intel, whatever failures happen at the manufacturing or QA stages, to get the customer care done correctly. I expect that to happen even if Intel does not yet completely understand the scope of the problem or how it could be addressed. And they really did not.

toddestan ,

I’d argue there was a fourth serious failure, and that was Intel allowing the motherboard manufacturers to go nuts and run these chips way out of spec by default. Granted, ultimately it was the motherboard manufacturers that did it, but there’s really no excuse for what these motherboards were doing by default. Yes, I get the “K” chips are unlocked, but it should be up to the user to choose to overclock their CPU and how they want to go about it. To make matters worse, a lot of these motherboards didn’t even have an easy way to put things back into spec - it was up to you to go through all the settings one by one and set them correctly.

jordanlund , (edited )
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

Aw, geeze, I just got gifted a new PC for father’s day, now I have shit to do…

Edit 13th Gen Raptor Lake i5-13400F at 65W.

Well, fuck me.

InAmberClad ,

My understanding is that 13th gen CPU’s below 13600K are rebadged Alder Lake (12th gen) chips therefore aren’t affected by this issue.

jordanlund ,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

Well that would be nice! Thanks for the tip!

jordanlund ,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

Apparently… “it’s complicated”. There ARE Raptor lake variants of this CPU, they are just less common.

hwcooling.net/…/not-every-core-i5-13400f-is-the-s…

Only way to tell if it’s Alder or Raptor is by checking the S-Spec Code:

Alder Lake, S-Spec code SRMBN
Raptor Lake, S-Spec code SRMBG

kelargo ,

Is this resulting from Intel’s use of hidden Minix OS in their CPUs?

mox OP ,

I don’t think we’ve been given any reason to believe this was caused by Intel Management Engine.

wirehead ,

A few years ago now I was thinking that it was about time for me to upgrade my desktop (with a case that dates back to 2000 or so, I guess they call them “sleepers” these days?) because some of my usual computer things were taking too long.

And I realized that Intel was selling the 12th generation of the Core at that point, which means the next one was a 13th generation and I dono, I’m not superstitious but I figured if anything went wrong I’d feel pretty darn silly. So I pulled the trigger and got a 12th gen core processor and motherboard and a few other bits.

This is quite amusing in retrospect.

JPAKx4 ,

I recently built myself a computer, and went with AMD’s 3d cache chips and boy am I glad. I think I went 12th Gen for my brothers computer but it was mid range which hasn’t had these issues to my knowledge.

Also yes, sleeper is the right term.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I think I went 12th Gen for my brothers computer

12th gen isn’t affected. The problem affects only the 13th and 14th gen Intel chips. If your brother has 12th gen – and you might want to confirm that – he’s okay.

For the high-end thing, initially it was speculated that it was just the high-end chips in these generations, but it’s definitely the case that chips other than just the high-end ones have been recorded failing. It may be that the problem is worse with the high-end CPUs, but it’s known to not be restricted to them at this point.

The bar they list in the article here is 13th and 14th gen Intel desktop CPUs over 65W TDP.

InAbsentia ,

Thankfully I haven’t had any issues out of my 13700k but it’s pretty shitty of Intel to not stand behind their products and do a recall.

TrickDacy ,

Amd processors have literally always been a better value and rarely have been surpassed by much for long. The only problem they ever had was back in the day they overheated easily. But I will never ever buy an Intel processor on purpose, especially after this.

mox OP ,

The only problem they ever had was back in the day they overheated easily.

That’s not true. It was just last year that some of the Ryzen 7000 models were burning themselves out from the insides at default settings (within AMD specs) due to excessive SoC voltage. They fixed it through new specs and working with board manufacturers to issue new BIOS, and I think they eventually gave in to pressure to cover the damaged units. I guess we’ll see if Intel ends up doing the same.

I generally agree with your sentiment, though. :)

I just wish both brands would chill. Pushing the hardware so hard for such slim gains is wasting power and costing customers.

TrickDacy ,

Yeah. I just meant AMD cpus used to easily overheat if your cooling system had an issue. My ryzen 7 3700x has been freaking awesome though. Feels more solid than any PC I’ve built. And it’s fast AF. I think I saved over $150 when comparing to a similarly rated Intel CPU. And the motherboards generally seem cheaper for AMD too. I would feel ripped off with Intel even without the crashing issues

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Problem is that it’s getting extremely hard to get more single-threaded performance out of a chip, and this is one of the few ways to do so. And a lot of software is not going to be rewritten to use multiple cores. In some cases, it’s fundamentally impossible to parallelize a particular algorithm.

ichbinjasokreativ ,

That was asus applying too much voltage to the x3d skus

mox OP ,

Where do you think Asus got the specs for that voltage?

ichbinjasokreativ ,

Then why were there essentially no blow ups from other motherboard manufacturers? Tell me if my information on this is wrong, but when there’s only one brand causing issues then they’re the ones to blame for it.

SpaceCadet ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

That’s not true. It was just last year that some of the Ryzen 7000 models were burning themselves

I think he was referring to “back-in-the-day” when Athlons, unlike the competing Pentium 3 and 4 CPUs of the day, didn’t have any thermal protections and would literally go up in smoke if you ran them without cooling.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRn8ri9tKf8

RdVortex , (edited )

Some motherboards did have overheating protection back then though. Personally I had my Athlon XP computer randomly shut down several times back then, because the system had some issue, where fans would randomly start slowing down and eventually completely stop. This then triggered overheat protection of the motherboard, which simply cut the power as soon as the temperature was too hight.

Deway ,

rarely have been surpassed by much for long.

I’ve been on team AMD for over 20 years now but that’s not true. The CoreDuo and the first couple of I CPUS were better than what AMD was offering and were for a decade. The Athlon were much better than the Pentium 3 and P4, the Ryzen are better than the current I series but the Phenom weren’t. Don’t get me wrong, I like my Phenom II X4 but it objectively wasn’t as good as Intel’s offerings back in the day.

deltapi ,

My i5-4690 and i7-4770 machines remain competitive to this day, even with spectre patches in place. I saw no reason to ‘upgrade’ to 6/7/8th gen CPUs.

I’m looking for a new desktop now, but for the costs involved I might just end up parting together a HP Z6 G4 with server surplus cpu/ram. The costs of going to 11th+ desktop Intel don’t seem worth it.

I’m going to look at the more recent AMD offerings, but I’m not sure they’ll compete with surplus server kit.

sebsch ,

Is there really still such a market for Intel CPUs? I do not understand that AMDs Zen is so much better and is the superior technology since almost a decade now.

mrvictory1 ,

Prebuilts and laptops

ruse8145 ,

www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html#xy_…Don’t see data backing up your claim across a wide range of perf

SpaceCadet ,
@SpaceCadet@feddit.nl avatar

Why does that graph show Epyc (server) and Threadripper (workstation) processors in the upper right corner, but not the equivalent Xeons? If you take those away, it would paint a different picture.

Also, a price/performance graph does not say much about which is the superior technology. Intel has been struggling to keep up with AMD technologically the past years, and has been upping power targets and thermal limits to do so … which is one of the reasons why we are here points at headline.

I do hope they get their act together, because we an AMD monopoly would just be as bad as an Intel monopoly. We need the competition, and a healthy x86 market, lest proprietary ARM based computers take over the market (Apple M-chips, Snapdragon laptops,…)

Luccus ,
@Luccus@feddit.org avatar

I don’t see data backing up your claim […]

Links a list where the three top spots substantiate the claim, followed by a comparatively large 8% drop.

To add a bit of nuance: There are definitely exceptions to the claim. But if I had to make a blanket statement, it would absolutely be in favor of AMD.

Kashmir ,

So this is why my computer randomly shuts down and freezes up.

Im_old ,

Well, could also be PSU or MB. Had both of them fail with those symptoms

Mwa ,
@Mwa@thelemmy.club avatar

lol i use 12 gen intel

cordlesslamp ,

lol you use intel

Mwa ,
@Mwa@thelemmy.club avatar

yes and i was recommended by my old friend and the internet amd

2pt_perversion ,

People are freaking out about the lack of a recall but intel says their patch that will supposedly stop currently working cpus from experiencing the overvolt condition that is leading to the failure. So they don’t really need to do a recall if currently working CPUs will stay working with the patch in place. As long as they offer some sort of free extended warranty and a good RMA proccess for the CPUs that are already damaged I feel it’s fine.

If they RMA with a bump in perf for those affected it might even be positive PR like “they stand by their products” but if they’re stingy with responsibility then we should obviously give them hell. We really have to see how they handle this.

A_Random_Idiot ,

They cant even commit to offering RMAs, period. They keep using vague, cant-be-used-against-me-in-a-court-of-law language.

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