Intel has reportedly started investigating the instability issue:

wccftech.com/intel-13th-14th-gen-cpu-gaming-stability-investigated-chips-being-returned-in-korea/

BoggledBeagleSorry, but abandoning an industry good practice of providing safety margins for product reliability and selling products stretched to breaking point is not remarkable, that is just SAD. Or even TRAGIC.

And even more sad is, that these are actually very good products, being LITERALLY DESTROYED by their manufacturer with insane out of the box settings and not having enough control over what motherboard manufacturers do with these chips, everything done only to improve how Intel looks, at the expense of the end customers. Because they will have problems dealing with all those baked, failing and unstable chips.

Tragedy.

If you making these sort of claims, I hope you have something to back it up, at least try to post something with substance. I havent seen any evidence of recent Intel chips failing in batches whilst running at spec.

Running chips out of spec can of course cause problems, but that applies to all chip vendors, as an example if I try to even bump my 2600X by 100mhz its unstable, its stock settings are "right at the limit". Its not faulty as at spec its stable.

chrcolukIf you making these sort of claims, I hope you have something to back it up, at least try to post something with substance. I havent seen any evidence of recent Intel chips failing in batches whilst running at spec. Running chips out of spec can of course cause problems ...

I have never said that Intel chips are failing in mass numbers, but after playing with a few of 13th gen and 14th gen Intel chips I got a good idea of what these chips can comfortably handle, and what settings are pushing these chips hard, potentially damaging them in longer or even shorter periods of time.

I do not think that Intel is enforcing specs well enough, and it does not matter much, if the specs themselves are pushed to the edge.

You can see in the above screenshot from the Korean site, that even a small numbers of failing chips can cause problems to customers and vendors, because even customers with at the moment fully functional chips want to get rid of them, when they lost confidence that they can run reliably.

BTW even when we talk about a special variant of the CPU - fully unlocked and user configurable K model - such special CPU should be in no way less reliable, while running in specs, than the normal CPUs.

It is really painful to see, what Intel does to their own products. For example 14900K limited to 180W power draw runs under an air cooler with the worst Cinebench load really cool - after few minutes the absolute maximum temperature over all cores was 73°C (average temperature much lower, P cores running at 4900 MHz), I just tested it quickly this morning before I left to work.

When you also run limited frequency (lower than specs), you never see even that temperature, when I loaded the P cores with heavy load and let them run at 5200 Mhz, their max temp was lower than what I mentioned.

I would like to know the comparison of actual electric currents running in the silicon in the two variants of 14900K - my 14900K limited to 5200/4200 MHz and 180W and a stock 14900K placed in the motherboard that does not even enforce the Intel specs power limits. The strain each silicon chip endures in these two scenarios should be somehow quantifiable.

It should be also noted that temperature sensors are not everywhere in the silicon and the differences in REAL MAXIMAL temperatures reached in the chips could be dramatically between the above mentioned settings.

I just learned, that according to Blacks equation for electromigration doubling current density can mean reducing mean time to failure up to a fourth, with higher temperature making it even worse.

EDIT:
I tried to calculate Blacks equation for the activation energy 0,9 eV, current density exponent 1,2, doubling current density and increasing temperature from 60°C (333K) to 100°C (373K), and I got 66 times shorter time before failure. Did I make a mistake in the calculation? It seems wrong.

You keep saying failing chips, but there is no evidence of that. If you run something out of spec and it doesnt work properly, it doesnt mean its failing.

I just found something supporting my (probably not very accurate) result, that electromigration is strongly dependent on temperature:



Increasing temperature by 57/60°C caused tenfold decrease of the time to reach the same amount of failures.

While good data, the problem is that formulae such as Black's equation will apply to any semiconductor, regardless of type or brand. If targeting a 20 year lifespan at spec, you'll get more by being conservative with the chip. I don't really see the issue.

Dr. Dro20 year lifespan at spec

Stop parroting this nonsense. Show me an official document from Intel about current consumer CPUs stating this. It does not exist.

BTW I cannot find ANY white papers or documentation from Intel about current CPUs.

MLID in his latest video

Intel 14th Gen Mass Failures Leak, AMD Zen 7, Nvidia RTX 5090 & 5080, TSMC 2nm | Broken Silicon 254 (youtube.com)

quoted a retailer:

Whatever MLID says, you can print it and use as TP; it's all it's good for.

Another video on topic: