Nearly four months after Intel’s woes with its desktop 13th and 14th Gen CPUs reared their ugly, system crashing head, the chipmaker claims to have finally located the source of its silicon headache.
In a recent update on its community page, Intel says that it managed to pinpoint the instability issue down to an “elevated operating voltage”, stemming from a microcode algorithm that resulted in incorrect voltage requests being sent to the processors.
Intel says that it will be sending out a microcode patch sometime in mid-August after it has fully and properly validated the process.
“Intel is delivering a microcode patch which addresses the root cause of exposure to elevated voltages. We are continuing validation to ensure that scenarios of instability reported to Intel regarding its Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors are addressed.”
Prior to this, the last time Intel addressed the 13th and 14th Gen instability issues was back in May. The chipmaker also pushed out a microcode patch then, thinking that it had identified the issue but unfortunately, it didn’t.
It also didn’t help the chipmaker’s case when TechTuber Level1Techs and the game developer Alderon Games became vocal about the instability and crashing issues over the following months. Heck, the game studio even posted a video on YouTube, detailing the “thousands” of game crashes that impacted players running systems with 13th and 14th Gen CPUs.
Intel’s upcoming patch is certainly and always welcome but it remains to be seen if issues with the elevated operating voltage actually is the problem; only time and feedback from its 13th and 14th Gen CPU users will let us know if the crisis has been averted. Until then, we’ll likely see many folks switching over to, or being recommended, AMD CPUs.
(Source: Intel, The Verge, Tom’s Hardware)
