Intel Says It Has Isolated Voltage Issues Causing CPU Instability
Intel, one of the world’s largest chip makers, has been dealing with instability issues with some of its CPUs since 2022. The company believes it has finally found the root cause and will be able to address the issue through a patch next month.
“Based on extensive analysis of Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors returned to us due to instability issues, we have determined that elevated operating voltage is causing instability issues in some 13th/14th Gen desktop processors,” explains Intel employee Thomas Hannaford in an Intel community post. “Our analysis of returned processors confirms that the elevated operating voltage is stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor.”
Hannaford adds that Intel is developing a microcode patch to address the elevated voltage issue and actively validating the fix across 13th and 14th-generation Intel desktop processors.
“Intel is committed to making this right with our customers, and we continue asking any customers currently experiencing instability issues on their Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop processors reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance,” Hannaford concludes.
WCCF Tech has published coverage of the situation, including a comprehensive recap of the timeline of events. The tech publication notes that memory issues were first reported in late 2022, within a few months of Intel launching its 13th-generation CPUs.
Throughout 2023, users reported abnormally high numbers of crashes with various games, including many that use Unreal Engine, one of the most popular game engines.
Fast forward to this year, the issue got mainstream attention when Sebastian Castellanos wrote about it on X, formerly known as Twitter. The problem got widespread attention, and it got a bit messy.
For some time, users thought the issue might be related to Nvidia’s GPUs, which Nvidia denied in April while simultaneously pointing people with problem’s to Intel’s doorstep.
Intel acknowledged the issue publicly and began an active investigation that same month.
Motherboard makers became involved, too, by writing new power profiles for Intel CPUs to reduce power limits, but this, naturally, comes with a dip in performance.
In May, Intel told motherboard manufacturers to stop shipping units with custom BIOS firmware and sell products with Intel’s default settings.
Earlier this month, the situation escalated rapidly, getting significantly more attention online from people like Level1Techs and Gamers Nexus on YouTube. Their videos racked up more than one million combined views.
Intel has also said its mobile CPUs aren’t plagued with the same instability issues, although, PetaPixel‘s experience suggests otherwise.
“The symptoms being reported on 13th/14th-gen mobile systems – including system hangs and crashes — are common symptoms stemming from a broad range of potential software and hardware issues. As always, if users are experiencing issues with their Intel-powered laptops we encourage them to reach out to the system manufacturer for further assistance,” Intel told Digital Trends.
In any event, that brings the situation to this week, with Intel saying that the issues should be addressed via an Intel-developed microcode patch to be released by mid-August. Fingers crossed it fixes the problem.
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