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Curious why Intel announced this on their community forums, rather than somewhere more official.
That’s probably where people are mostly likely to understand it. A lot of companies do this, especially while they’re still learning things.
After watching https://youtube.com/watch?v=gTeubeCIwRw and some related content, I personally don't believe it's an issue fixable with microcode. I guess we'll see.
That said, the video is the GamersNexus one where they talk about an unverified claim that this is a fabrication process issue caused by oxidation between atomic deposition layers. If that's the case, then yeah, microcode can only do so much. But like Steve says in the video, the oxidation theory has yet to be proven and they're just reporting what they have so far ahead of the Zen 5 reviews coming soon.
Looks like history may be repeating itself, or at least rhyming somewhat.
Back then, CPUs ran on fixed voltages and frequencies and only overclockers discovered the limits. Even then, it was rare to find reports of CPUs killed via overvolting, unless it was to an extreme extent --- thermal throttling, instability, and shutdown (THERMTRIP) seemed to occur before actual damage, preventing the latter from happening.
Now, with CPU manufacturers attempting to squeeze all the performance they can, they are essentially doing this overclocking/overvolting automatically and dynamically in firmware (microcode), and it's not surprising that some bug or (deliberate?) ignorance that overlooked reliability may have pushed things too far. Intel may have been more conservative with the absolute maximum voltages until recently, and of course small process sizes with higher potential for electromigration are a source of increased fragility.
Also anecdotal, but I have an 8th-gen mobile CPU that has been running hard against the thermal limits (100C) 24/7 for over 5 years (stock voltage, but with power limits all unlocked), and it is still 100% stable. This and other stories of CPUs in use for many years with clogged or even detached heatsinks seem to contribute to the evidence that high voltage is what kills CPUs, and neither heat nor frequency.
Edit: I just looked up the VCore maximum for the 13th/14th processors - the datasheet says 1.72V! That is far more than I expected for a 10nm process. For comparison, a 1st-gen i7 (45nm) was specified at 1.55V absolute maximum, and in the 32nm version they reduced that to 1.4V; then for the 22nm version it went up slightly to 1.52V.
Remains to be seen how the microcode patch affects performance, and how these CPUs that have been affected by over-voltage to the point of instability will have aged in 6 months, or a few years from now. More voltage generally improves stability, because there is more slack to close timing. Instability with high voltage suggests dangerous levels. A software patch can lower the voltage from this point on, but it can't…
intel is claiming 4% performance hit on the final patch https://youtu.be/wkrOYfmXhIc?t=308
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like their analysis is that the oxidation issue is comfortably below the level of "defective". No product will ever be perfect. You don't need to do a recall for a sufficiently rare problem. And in case anyone skims, I will be extra clear, this is based on the claim that the oxidation is separate from the real problem here.
They could recall the defective batch. All of the cpus with that defect will fail from it. The seem to have been content to hope no one noticed.
That description sounds to me like it affected the entire production line for months. It's only worth a recall if a sufficient percent of those CPUs will fail. (I don't want to argue about what particular percent that should be.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It seems AMD had an issue supporting ECC with the current chipsets. AMD has the advantage with regards to ECC. Intel doesn't support ECC at all on consumer chips, you need to go Xeon. AMD supports it on all chips, but it is up to the motherboard vendor to (correctly) implement. You can get consumer-class AM4/5 boards that have ECC support.
My understanding is that it's screwed up for multiple vendors and chipsets. The boards might say they support it, but there are some updates saying it's not. It seemed extremely hard to find any that actually supported it. It was actually easier to find new Intel boards supporting ECC.
https://youtu.be/RdYToqy05pI?t=503
I don't know how many times it has to be said but "doesn't explicitly disable" is not the same thing as "support". There are lots of other enablement steps that are required to get ECC to work properly, and they really need to be explicitly tested with each release (which if it is "not explicitly disabled", it's not getting tested). Support means you can complain to someone when it doesn't work right.
AMD churns AGESA really, really hard and it breaks all the time. Partners have to try and chase the upstream and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Elmor (Asus's Bios Guy) talked about this on Overclock.net back around 2017-2018 when AMD was launching X399 and talked about some of the troubles there and with AM4.
That said, the current situation has seemingly lit a fire under the board partners, with Intel out of commission and all these customers desperate for an alternative to their W680/raptor lake systems (which do support ecc officially, btw) in these performance-sensitive niches or power-limited datacenter layouts, they are finally cleaning up the mess like, within the last 3 weeks or so. They've very quickly gone from not caring about these boards to seeing a big market opportunity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1tXJ8HZcj4
can't believe how many times I've explained in the last month that yes, people do actually run 13700Ks in the datacenter... with ECC... and actually it's probably some pretty big names in fact. A previous video dropped the tidbit that one of the major affected customers is Citadel Capital - and yeah, those are the guys who used to get special EVEREST and BLACK OPS skus from intel for the same thing. Client platform is better at that, the very best sapphire rapids or epyc -F or -X3D sku is going to be like 75% of the performance at best. It's also the fastest thing available for serving NVMe flash storage (and Intel specifically targeted this, the Xeon E-2400 series with the C266 chipset can talk NVMe SAS natively on its chipset with up to 4 slimsas ports...)
it's somewhere in this one I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHCLBqRrnY
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was recently looking at building and buying a couple systems. I've always liked Intel. I went AMD this time. It seemed like the base frequencies vs boost frequencies were much farther apart on Intel than with most of the AMDs. This was especially true on the laptops were cooling is a larger concern. So I suspect they were pushing limits. Also, the performance core vs efficiency core stuff seemed kind of gimmicky wi…
> It seems AMD had an issue supporting ECC with the current chipsets. AMD has the advantage with regards to ECC. Intel doesn't support ECC at all on consumer chips, you need to go Xeon. AMD supports it on all chips, but it is up to the motherboard vendor to (correctly) implement. You can get consumer-class AM4/5 boards that have ECC support.
There was a strange happening with AMD laptop CPUs (“APUs”): the non-soldered DDR5 variants of the 7x40’s were advertised to support ECC RAM on AMD’s website up until a couple months before any actual laptops were sold, then that was silently changed and ECC is only on the PRO models now. I still don’t know if this is a straightforward manufacturing or chipset issue of some kind or a sign of market segmentation to come.
(I’m quite salty I couldn’t get my Framework 13 with ECC RAM because of this.)
Are the CPUs that received elevated operating voltage permanently damaged?
Curious why Intel announced this on their community forums, rather than somewhere more official.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More E-core is reasonable for multi threaded application performance. It's efficient for power and die area as the name indicates, so they can implement more E-cores than P-cores for the same power/area budget. It's not suitable for who need many single threaded performance cores like VM server, but I don't know is there any major consumer usage requires such performance.
I can sort of see that. The way I saw it explained as them being much lower clock and having a pretty small shared cache. I could see E cores as being great for running background processes and stuff. All the benchmarks seem to show the AMDs with 2/3rd the cores being around the same performance and with similar power draw. I'm not putting them down. I'm just saying it seems gimmicky to say "look at our 20 core!" wit…