The damage is contained to high-end 13th- and 14th-generation desktop processors aimed at gamers.
You may have heard rumors and read stories about a high-profile processor flaw from Intel, but unless you are a gamer building a high-performance system, you have nothing to worry about.
For some time now, Intel has been investigating reports that high-end 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs were crashing during gameplay. The problem mainly showed up with Core i9-13900K and 14900K processors, but it was not exclusive to those two, which are top-of-the-line high-performance game chips.
The problem lies in the CPU microcode, which caused the CPU to send elevated voltage levels, resulting in the processor operating outside its safe boundaries. A motherboard will shut down the system if the voltages go beyond certain thresholds as a protective measure.
The problem is not just an inconvenience of your computer shutting down in the gaming. The bug causes irreversible degradation of the processor over time. Sure, Intel can issue a microcode update. But there is no reversing the damage done to that $1,000 CPU. Needless to say, gamers are not happy.
Fortunately, the issue only applies to the high-end desktop processors. Xeons are safe.
Part of the problem is that the desktop parts are designed for overclocking, because gamers want to squeeze as much performance out of their processors as is possible. But the design of the Xeon inherently disallows overclocking of any kind and has more rigid control over the voltage, so the features and architecture don’t exist in the Xeon that would allow for this problem in the first place.
Still, it’s a black eye for Intel and a bad one. This flaw found its way into their high-end hardware, which they are probably going to have to replace for all the gamers who got burned (no pun intended), and it stuck around for two generations. This comes on top of layoffs of 15,000 employees, a weak quarterly report with bad guidance, and faltering sales.
This is how reputations are lost, and as AMD knows all too well, a lost reputation can take a long time to recover.
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- $15 billion deal with Microsoft boosts Intel’s chipmaking vision
