In May 2024, Intel issued an official statement about the stability issues of its 13th and 14th gen CPUs. Back then, Intel was claiming that the stability issues were due to incorrect BIOS profiles. However, that turned out to be false. And today, the blue team issued yet another official statement about these issues.
Intel now claims that the crashes were caused by an elevated operating voltage. The elevated operating voltage appears to be stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor.
To resolve this, Intel will release a microcode patch that will address the root cause of exposure to elevated voltages.
As Intel stated:
“Based on extensive analysis of Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors returned to us due to instability issues, we have determined that elevated operating voltage is causing instability issues in some 13th/14th Gen desktop processors. Our analysis of returned processors confirms that the elevated operating voltage is stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor.
Intel is delivering a microcode patch which addresses the root cause of exposure to elevated voltages. We are continuing validation to ensure that scenarios of instability reported to Intel regarding its Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors are addressed. Intel is currently targeting mid-August for patch release to partners following full validation.
Intel is committed to making this right with our customers, and we continue asking any customers currently experiencing instability issues on their Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance.”
Intel plans to release this microcode patch in mid-August.
So, there you have it. Right from Intel’s mouse. Let’s now hope that this microcode patch will finally resolve these stability issues.
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Agree intel cpus are hogs for little benefit other then burning them out or instability so people will upgrade spend more. Especially mobile versions. I'm still on 10th gen and won't upgrade till it's abs necessary just have to remember this to avoid 13 14 gen if I go intel at that point. Strange they don't seem to do testing irl or limited testing on real systems etc
years ago there was a whistleblower saying they put nsa backdoors through the new intel cpus, combine that with these issues and how crowdstrike collapsed so many systems and its clear they are going to fake a cyber attack to justify more control.
It's not hard to see really, come up with some bs story and most people will believe it , happened recently with trumpina-steinberg. So yeah chinese or russians or nebulous climate change play bad guy turn off power for likely 11 days, 22, 33, 13 etc then it's either war or it's "climate change" cc 33 martial law and such. These mafioso have a schedule to keep 2033.
Note that Crowdstrike update only took down Windows systems, because that is a high-quality OS written by the world's best software developers.
Microsoft obviously knows this fact, which is why they are constantly growing their internal Linux division while downsizing the Windows team at the same time.
Therefore, expect future versions of Windows to be even more awesome!
windows sucks now everything crashes, can i play new games with linux?
Yep, on steam via proton… for the most part..
The NSA backdoor
storyConspiracy Theory is over 25 years old …….and?
Also its not a conspiracy theory anymore, like many other things, like joe bidens’ mental state.
https://media2.giphy.com/media/45gbcie1l0aA9n80Xg/giphy-downsized-small.mp4 https://media4.giphy.com/media/VUVzUF3QO3keljTJ90/giphy-downsized-small.mp4
https://media3.giphy.com/media/9MFsKQ8A6HCN2/giphy-downsized-small.mp4
Didn't read but I'm guessing the "fix" involves cutting down clock speeds
Cutting voltage.
Which in turn lowers clock speeds but only the maximum boost clock speeds which aren't guaranteed. Only the base clock frequency is guaranteed and it's unlikely they will have to lower the base clocks
I'll still stick with my 1.5 year old crazy theory, Their outdated node was pushed too far, They won't be fixing much with a microcode update unless it means dropping the performance even more, Performance YOU paid for!
Note that the node used for these Intel CPUs is not their famous "14nm++++++" anymore, that stopped with the 11th gen.
That being said, most performance gets crippled via OS updates against known CPU speculation vulnerabilities these days.
In fact, even Valve is impacted by these performance degradations on their Steam Deck, where the upgrade to Linux 6.1 brought a mitigation for the "Retbleed" vulnerability on AMD's Zen 2 architecture.
But thankfully, completely disabling these CPU slowdowns is very easy to do by simply adding "mitigations=off" as a kernel parameter on Linux.
As our resident Linux fanboy pointed out, this is not the same old 14nm node Intel was dragging through the mud for years. This is a newer one, I think 10nm for 13th gen and 7nm for 14th gen, and if I remember right their 12th gen CPU's also used the newer 10nm node.
Yeah people get confused by the nanometers pretty easily.
so basically it's unavoidable and they won't compensate the users.
But can't you use offset voltage to make sure it doesn't go past a certain point and then just go back and forth until your system is fast and stable, or is there something more to it? If this is the case why didn't anyone notice before specifically, I always knew intel used more power but no one really mentioned this. Anyways I never let my intel cpu run wild.
There is more to it than that, the problem here seems to be with the loadline calibration. Whenever you start drawing heavy current the voltages tend to sag, especially true with these inefficient power hungry 13th and 14th gen CPUs. To compensate they create a loadline that sets the actual voltages and to reduce the amount of voltage sag during high current loads they raise the voltages at low currents. Basically the algorithm in the microcode is setting the low current voltages too high which in turn leads to instability and even silicon degradation.
Will a new loadline calibration hurt performance? Maybe a little, maybe a lot and there is even a slim chance performance will increase if the loadline calibration was that far off
Hope some will revisit the benchmarks done previously too see where that along with the previous correcting MC have done to the performance… I mean they say you get xx while now you might only get yy instead IE live on old merits from the past once they were released (and thus benchmarked vs the competition)
Anyone who thinks this is just an Intel issue has not been paying attention.
Transistors are now so small that it is near impossible to not have leakage current. Slashing the voltage to decrease leakage will decrease performance. So it's a catch 22, current chip design has reached its limits.
This is from 2021, where Google and Facebook engineers noticed chip miniaturisation increasingly leads to chips doing miscalculations, sometimes leading to system crashes. They wrote a whole paper on it.
It is not a question if chips nowadays do miscalculations, they do, it is a question of how many, and if it leads to a crash.
STMicroelectronics, NXP, Bosch, Infineon, etc. They all make chips with a much bigger node. Car manufacturers, embedded systems, power plants, they all buy them and would never in a million year buy Intel or AMD chips, since Intel and AMD have an abnormally high number of issues.
The best advice if you go x86 and don't want an unstable system or corrupted files, is to stay away from the latest chips, especially cache heavy ones, like i7, i9, X3D, etc.
STMicroelectronics, NXP, Bosch, Infineon, etc. They all make chips with a much bigger node to avoid leakage current.
Car manufacturers, embedded systems, power plants, they all buy them and would never in a million years buy Intel or AMD chips, since Intel and AMD have an abnormally high number of issues.
The best advice if you go x86 and don't want an unstable system or corrupted files, is to stay away from the latest chips, especially high powered ones.
The copium is real, there haven't been any reports of AMD CPUs degradation, while Intel has a failure rate of 90%.
Microcode patch will not fix this, there are also issues on HW level.
Funny how Intel didn't drop the blame on the users and MB manufacturers.
Will they compensate users with degraded cpus that no longer sustain the OOB behavior and need undervolting and underclocking?
LOL.
My friend still crashes as f*k with his 13700k
And what about the theory that Gamers Nexus publicized about oxidation happening in the CPU's? Is this just more BS from Intel to make it look like they are actually fixing the problem? Or is this a multipronged issue where Intel has to resolve multiple causes of failures, and the final one can only be resolved on the manufacturing end?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTeubeCIwRw&t=933s
Let’s wait and see. I’m sure GN and HardwareUnboxed will test the CPUs with this microcode patch. If it resolves – or not – all issues, they’ll report it.
Considering the video by Gamers Nexus where they were talking about this with Wendell from Level1Techs, I think it will be more of a case of waiting to see whether or not datacenters, game testing teams, and other major Intel clients still experience significant failure rates after the microcode update. I'm not sure how easy it is for tech reviewers to replicate the failures, and it would certainly be rather expensive to buy a bunch of CPU's to burn for this.
As for GN, they're sending as many degraded Intel CPU's as they can afford to have tested to a failure analysis lab to see if they can establish whether or not there is actually oxidation happening inside the CPU's. If they confirm it, then a microcode update won't "fix" it, although lowering voltages might slow down the oxidation (GN noted that it does happen faster at higher voltages) so the microcode patch may help effected CPU's last longer before showing signs of instability.
It looks like Intel confirmed the oxidation issue as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVdmK1UGzGs