Intel processors crashing Unreal engine games (and others)

[DAPUNISHER]

Now, that is all true.

The kickback may be against tech stocks and particularly those experiencing public issues right now. So the backlash correlation might not have anything to do with causality but via their tech stock relationship.

This. I thought the opinion piece made it clear that it was the negative halo effect and was not based on anything other than what usually steers investors, greed and fear.

Shooting the messenger is sometimes warranted, but from my interpretation of what was written, this is not one of those cases.

 

[controlflow]

Now, that is all true.

The kickback may be against tech stocks and particularly those experiencing public issues right now. So the backlash correlation might not have anything to do with causality but via their tech stock relationship.

I think that's possible.

It is just that the whole Raptor Lake instability issue has been reported for months but Intel stock hasn't gone really anywhere in the past few months. If anything INTC is actually up 8% the past month even after the big decline on Friday, all while the negative news around RPL instability has gained more coverage.

In the past 5 days INTC declined 4.98% and the tech sector ETF XLK declined 5.98%. So Intel actually declined less than the entire tech sector. It is a stretch to really tie any of that to RPL issues. All I can see is that Intel declined with the rest of the sector but actually fared a tad better than most this week.

I deeply distrust these clickbait articles from investment sites because they try so hard to write some article to find some kind of signal in what may just be noise, they can often come up with things that are a real stretch or total nonsense. It has gotten even worse recently because so much of this stuff is autogenerated garbage from LLMs now. Sometime earlier this year I saw an article trying to explain all the reasons why a particular stock was down 50%. In reality the stock simply had a 2:1 split, but the LLM generated article was too dumb to recognize that.

Anyway, I will not rant about investment site clickbait any further. Back to the topic.

 

[coercitiv]

So if non B0 mobile CPUs are affected we should expect that also the non B0 desktop Core i5 models are affected right? Is there something in other forums or reddit whatever? We should wait for other sources, call me sceptical. HX B0 would make sense of course.

We have no definitive source of information for the mobile chip claims, only anecdotal examples from Alderon Games saying they have a few mobile machines that throw out similar errors to the ones they see on desktop RPL. So given the current status quo, I would argue mobile chips are only suspects at this point.

In the following days we may also see EMR mentioned as possibly affected, if this happens I would urge folks around here to ignore it and not amplify it as long as no credible information is attached to the claim. A shy attempt was already made last week. We don't need this kind of FUD, we got juicy controversy at home.

 

[Marcos Baras]

Hello!
I've been running an i5-13400F C0 stepping (Alder Lake die) for 7 months with no issues, thankfully. Can I assume i'm not affected, given I have a non-K SKU based on an Alder Lake silicon, or that's a full 13th gen CPU line problem?

Thx in advance!

 

[RnR_au]

Can I assume i'm not affected,

No. Not until Intel tells us what the problem is and the serial number range of the affected cpu's.

Everyone is guessing atm. Except Intel... assuming that they know what is going on already.

 

[mikk]

Hello!
I've been running an i5-13400F C0 stepping (Alder Lake die) for 7 months with no issues, thankfully. Can I assume i'm not affected, given I have a non-K SKU based on an Alder Lake silicon, or that's a full 13th gen CPU line problem?

Thx in advance!

C0 and Alder Lake in general isn't affected from what we know, only the B0 i5 might be vulnerable but haven't heard from 13400 or 14400 B0 issues so far. i5 non-K is much lower core count and clock speed.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I sincerely doubt that statement from alderon games. There may be a few unhinged people but there’s not some big grass roots uprising against this news.

Spoiler: ANECDOTE

We were shopping around for a vendor to manage our onpremises infrastructure migration to Azure Cloud. Microsoft UAE recommended this vendor to us who seemed to be in way too much of a hurry to sign us on. In almost every meeting, they would try to push us to go live (without testing properly) because they had done so for hundreds of their customers and they didn't foresee any issues. Well, my testing seemed to reveal they had no idea about database performance and how to improve it on Azure Managed SQL or Azure VMs. We kept getting less than 2x performance improvement in our testcases and they were clueless about how to help us get more performance out of the huge annual investment we were going to be making to move to the cloud. In the midst of these discussions, they offered us an Acronis email protection product and said that we absolutely needed it. We were like, we are more interested in the cloud migration at this point of time and our email security is fine. We have never had any serious incident. Well, about one week after this discussion with them, all sorts of weird things start happening to our Microsoft 365 email accounts. Some of our emails got hacked, mine included. It was actually worse for me because my email was used to send massive amounts of spam to other users, including some very high profile ones of our parent company who could've easily gotten me fired. We had to turn on additional security features like limiting email logins to our geographical region and enabling OTP authentication for all email users. But the amount of malicious spam suddenly went up to 11. To this day, we keep receiving such spam. I really have to wonder if it was that scummy vendor's doing and they are still taking "revenge" on us for not going with them. We chose another Microsoft Azure partner who was able to figure out the performance problems and we successfully moved to the cloud and been there since March of last year, with almost zero issues. The point is, hiring stupid hackers must be really cheap, for someone to still be harassing us with malicious emails.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Adds AMD stock to the watch list

 

[Asterox]

No. Not until Intel tells us what the problem is and the serial number range of the affected cpu's.

Everyone is guessing atm. Except Intel... assuming that they know what is going on already.

It is quite obvious that Intel knows where the problem is. But the problem is not solvable, or they just choose between a lesser bad choice. Whatever answer they choose, the company's reputation will suffer seriously.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I was aware of the other game devs that confirmed the stability issues, but did not realize fatshark was among them. If one of you mentioned this before, mea culpa. Bottom of the page -

https://support.fatshark.se/hc/en-us/articles/360021425793--PC-How-to-Resolve-Data-Corruption-Errors

 

[mikk]

Intel found the root cause.

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.

Zu hohe Spannung: Intel gibt Ergebnis seiner Analyse zu ausfallenden Prozessoren bekannt - Hardwareluxx

Zu hohe Spannung: Intel gibt Ergebnis seiner Analyse zu ausfallenden Prozessoren bekannt

www.hardwareluxx.de

 

[igor_kavinski]

Ah great. Now everybody just shutdown your 13th/14th gen CPUs and wait for the blessed patch to drop. Go take a vacation. Now's a good time as any!

 

[Rigg]

So are the elevated voltages directly causing instability or are the elevated voltages degrading the CPU permanently and causing instability?

 

[Hitman928]

So the CPUs are requesting too much voltage and causing themselves to degrade quickly and begin to fail at higher frequencies. That’s what I get from it at least. It’s curious that Intel wouldn’t catch this in their own testing as they should have seen the failures given how quickly some CPUs have degraded in the wild.

I could be completely wrong, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this might not be the end of the story. Hopefully I’m wrong.

 

[gdansk]

So, presumably, they may have to recall all CPUs that operated with earlier versions of the microcode?

 

[KompuKare]

At least by saying microcode they have finally gone past the line that it was all rogue motherboard manufacturers and their BIOS's.

The "we are committed to making this right part" is also positive.

Not mentioning that the affected CPUs are permanently damaged is a negative though.

 

[Joe NYC]

Ah great. Now everybody just shutdown your 13th/14th gen CPUs and wait for the blessed patch to drop. Go take a vacation. Now's a good time as any!

Microsoft gave people a day off.
Intel: "Hold my 14900k with oven mitts"

https://twitter.com/x/status/1814658121836732855

 

[coercitiv]

Andreas Schilling, editor @Hardwareluxx, on Twitter:

Unfortunately, the analysis result published by Intel is anything but satisfactory, as the exact reasons are not mentioned. Intel also does not mention any concrete or manual measures that could serve as a work-around until the microcode update.

That being said, something is better than nothing.

 

[coercitiv]

So, presumably, they may have to recall all CPUs that operated with earlier versions of the microcode?

Yes, Intel is committed to making things right with you, so make sure you reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance. Just make sure you don't get the support guy who's advising folks to add a positive voltage offset to their unstable CPU.

On second thought, maybe you need that guy to accelerate your RMA.

 

[ikjadoon]

Intel still is not disclosing which 13th / 14th Gen models are affected. It says “some”, but does that mean all units of some SKUs or some units of all SKUs or some units of some SKUs?

Official post here:

July 2024 Update on Instability Reports on Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen Desktop Processors

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...

community.intel.com

It’s also unclear what problem Intel is fixing: what are the specific “stability issues” that were identified as symptoms of elevated voltage?

That would help people narrow down their own system’s problems or decide on returns, if still possible.

 

[GTracing]

I'm skeptical that this is simply a bug with voltage being too high. Don't they have processes to catch these sort of things? I wonder if there will be loss of performance.

 

[desrever]

I'm skeptical that this is simply a bug with voltage being too high. Don't they have processes to catch these sort of things? I wonder if there will be loss of performance.

Maybe intel laid off too many QA staff and can't even catch something basic like this for 2 years

 

[gdansk]

I'm skeptical that this is simply a bug with voltage being too high. Don't they have processes to catch these sort of things? I wonder if there will be loss of performance.

It is possible that the "elevated operating voltage" is not only incorrect but also higher than necessary for the performance level.
But we'll see.

 

[MangoX]

That message from Intel is too vague and like others have said is missing important details. So people have to wait another month for something from Intel? Will there really be a fix for users?

I feel like Intel promises these days cannot be trusted. Remember back in April was it that they'd have something for us in May, then May goes by and no news until June? Their silence on this issue is equally terrifying as is disturbing.

 

[GTracing]

It is possible that the "elevated operating voltage" is not only incorrect but also higher than necessary for the performance level.
But we'll see.

Well, that's what I'm talking about though. If it's a bug with the core voltage going out of spec, wouldn't one of the testing guys say "Hey, this pin is spiking to 1.6V, that doesn't seem right"?