This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Intel has not halted sales or clawed back any inventory. It will not do a recall, period.
Buy AMD. Got it!
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.)
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.
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.
ARM looking pretty good too these days
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.
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.
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.
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).
It's not quite there for desktop use yet, but it probably won't be too much longer.
Smells like a future class action lawsuit to me.
You mean the type where the lawyers get eight figure payouts and you get a ten dollar check?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Don't worry. I'm sure the $10 Doordash card is coming to an inbox near you!
Aaaaaand it’s been cancelled by the issuing party.
Intel is about to have a lot of lawsuits on their hands if this delay deny deflect strategy doesn't work out for them. This problem has been going on for over a year and the details Intel lets slip just keep getting worse and worse. The more customers that realize they're getting defective CPUs, the more outcry there'll be for a recall. Intel is going to be in a lot of trouble if they wait until regulators force them to have a recall.
Big moment of truth is next month when they have earnings and we see what the performance impact from dropping voltages will be. Hopefully it'll just be 5% and no more CPUs die. I can't imagine investors will be happy about the cost, though.
I want to say gamers rise up, but honestly gamers calling their member of Congress every day and asking what they’re doing about this fraud would be way more effective. Congress is in a Big Tech regulating mood right now
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.
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.
After literally 14 years of avoiding AMD after getting burned twice I finally went back to team red just a week ago, for a new CPU
so glad I picked them now lol
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.
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.
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.
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.
Prebuilts and laptops
Intel is in the precarious position of being the largest surviving American owned semiconductor manufacturer, with the competition either existing abroad (TSMC, Samsung, ASML) or as a partner/subsidiary of a foreign national firm (NVidia simply procures its chips from TSMC, GlobalFoundries was bought up by the UAE sovereign wealth fund, etc).
Consequently, whenever the US dumps a giant bucket of money into the domestic semiconductor industry, Intel is there to clean up whether or not their technology actually works.
This would be funny if it happened to Nvidia.
Hope Intel recovers from this. Imagine if Nvidia was the only consumer hardware manufacturer....
No one wants that.
This would be funny if it happened to Nvidia.
Hope Intel recovers from this. Imagine if Nvidia was the only consumer hardware manufacturer…
Lol there was a reason Xbox 360s had a whopping 54% failure rate and every OEM was getting sued in the late 2000s for chip defects.
So like, did Intel lay off or deprecate its QA teams similar to what Microsoft did with Windows? Remember when stability was key and everything else was secondary? Pepperidge farms remembers.
I smell a class action lawsuit brewing
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.
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.
