Intel’s woes with their 13th and 14th gen chips has only gotten worse recently, with multiple reports pointing to hardware level failures. These crashes seem to occur at random, and occur as a result of improper, elevated voltage being pumped into the CPU.
The company has officially acknowledged the issue, and has planned a series of microcode updates to the BIOS to supposedly fix the issue. Unfortunately, there may be more to the situation that may appear at first glance, and a permanent fix may never come to pass.
Raptor Lake could be a costly mistake for Intel
The first reports of Intel-specific crashes were submitted by publisher Alderon Games, in their game, Path of the Titans. This data was backed up by a wide selection of user reports, and has been narrowed down to the 13th and 14th generation of CPUs.
The same was confirmed by a Warframe developer as well. Wendell from Level1Techs also conducted a thorough investigation of his own, and found that the CPU crashes (and failures) were indeed alarmingly high in the Raptor Lake series.
The issue seems to affect enthusiast and gaming workloads – for now.
What is perhaps most disappointing is Intel’s response – or lack thereof. Despite promises to fix the devastating bug via an August patch, several reports point that the damage is entirely irreversible, and can result in a bricked system.
The company insists that the damage is not permanent though, and can be easily reversed. An official statement regarding extended warranties and mass recall of the defective processors is yet to be made either.
Interestingly, AMD recently chose to recall its Ryzen 9000 series of CPUs as well, citing ‘quality assurance issues’ – which points at manufacturing defects creeping into next-gen silicon.
While efforts are underway to pinpoint the causative triggers for the crashes, it certainly does not paint a pretty picture for Intel, who have already been struggling to catch up with competitors in recent years.
