Intel finally confirmed on Monday that there are instability issues with its 13th and 14th Gen desktop CPUs.
Thomas Hannaford, Intel’s director of communications, attributed the issue to a bug in the microcode that requested incorrect voltage numbers, leading to the processor becoming unstable.
The company is in the process of releasing a microcode patch that “addresses the root cause of the voltage spike,” he added. The update is scheduled to arrive in mid-August.
Meanwhile, Intel has asked users experiencing instability issues to contact its support team for assistance.
The microcode bug was discovered after Intel reviewed processors that had been returned due to stability issues.
Until now, Intel’s guidelines have been a list of heavy BIOS settings that can reduce performance by up to 9 percent on CPUs like the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K, according to reports. Digital Trends.
An investigation by Level1Techs revealed that even 13th and 14th Gen CPUs running in servers experienced instability, despite more conservative power settings.
Alderon Games recently announced that it will be switching its 13th and 14th Gen Intel servers to AMD servers, and urged its peers to do the same.
Alderon founder Matthew Cassels said in a blog post earlier this month that the developer had encountered “significant” instability issues that no fixes have been able to fix so far. Cassels noted that Alderon has logged “thousands of crashes” on players’ CPUs using its crash reporting tools and says that the processors can also damage SSDs and memory. He added that in his team’s experience, 100 percent of affected CPUs “degrade over time, eventually failing.”
The issue may be more widespread and could affect laptop processors as well. Cassels noted that Intel’s 13th and 14th Gen Raptor Lake processors were also prone to instability and crashes.
Intel’s acknowledgement of the processor instability issues comes more than a week before AMD launches its Ryzen 9000 desktop processors. Whether the microcode patches will be effective enough to fix the issue and prevent customers from switching from Intel to AMD will be determined in the next few weeks.
