Back in April, we reported on how gamers in South Korea were getting refunds for their 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 desktop processors in droves over an “insufficient memory” issue that arose due to instability issues. Even worse, Intel is reportedly denying RMA requests over the affected high-end CPUs.
Worst, because of the chipmaker’s reluctance to honour an RMA or even issue a fix that Level1 Techs believes may not fixable with just a microcode update, a game developer by the name of Alderon Games is now warning others not to purchase any 13th or 14th Gen CPUs, and is outright accusing Intel of “selling defective CPUs”.
“Over the last 3–4 months, we have observed that CPUs initially working well deteriorate over time, eventually failing. The failure rate we have observed from our own testing is nearly 100%, indicating it’s only a matter of time before affected CPUs fail. This issue is gaining attention from news outlets and has been noted by Fortnite and RAD Game Tools, which powers decompression behind Unreal Engine.”
And it’s not just game developers too. Datacentre operators are increasingly feeling the instability issues of Intel’s 13th and 14th Gen processors. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of the run-off from this issue is that many of the affected folks are switching over to using AMD Ryzen CPUs. A step that Alderon Games has already taken, citing that it has experienced “100 times fewer crashes” compared to Intel CPUs that it had found to be defective.
To date, Intel has issued a statement over the stability issue back in May, recommending that users use its Default Setting profile to fix the issue. The following month, it said that an eTVB bug was the culprit causing the instability issue, and it was working on a fix. When that fix will be rolled out, however, is still up in the air.
(Source: XDA, Tweaktown, Level1 Techs, Alderon Games)
