Thursday, September 12th 2024
Hong Kong Distributor Runs Out of Replacement Core i9-14900K, Offers Refunds
Synnex Technology International is a major Hong Kong-based distributor of PC components, which also retails directly. PC enthusiasts in Hong Kong have been trying to avail replacements for their Intel Core i9-14900K processors under Intel's laid down procedure, including extended warranties for the processor, which has been hit by the notorious physical degradation issue. A customer sent in their i9-14900K to find that they are not getting a replacement chip, because Synnex ran out of chips to send customers as replacements.
The retailer sent in a template response that the chip sent by the customer cannot be repaired or replaced, but the customer can avail a cash refund of HKD $4,200 (around $540), which is close to the street price of the processor. The processor itself has been running out of stock in many places, partly because inventory in the channel is being directed toward honoring warranty claims. The only practical way to honor a processor warranty claim is replacement, since there is very little that can be repaired by a distributor (except maybe the stock cooler). HKEPC reports that the user took Synnex up on its offer for refund, sold everything in their machine except the SSD, and is now planning to build a new machine based on the Ryzen 9 9950X.
Sources:
HKEPC, VideoCardz
The retailer sent in a template response that the chip sent by the customer cannot be repaired or replaced, but the customer can avail a cash refund of HKD $4,200 (around $540), which is close to the street price of the processor. The processor itself has been running out of stock in many places, partly because inventory in the channel is being directed toward honoring warranty claims. The only practical way to honor a processor warranty claim is replacement, since there is very little that can be repaired by a distributor (except maybe the stock cooler). HKEPC reports that the user took Synnex up on its offer for refund, sold everything in their machine except the SSD, and is now planning to build a new machine based on the Ryzen 9 9950X.
46 Comments on Hong Kong Distributor Runs Out of Replacement Core i9-14900K, Offers Refunds
PS I misread your post, but I will leave the above paragraph. Those boards will be probably sold at a good price in the second hand market and it will be the opportunity for many to get a higher end motherboard for their current 12th/13th/14th gen CPUs, or upgrade from an older Intel platform while also getting their hands on a high end motherboard. Many will take as a fact that Intel 13th/14th problems are fixed and they will find the opportunity to build a high end system cheaper than what they where expecting.
The only thing it's really happening, is an acceleration of upgrades from owners of 12th/13th/14th gen systems to next gen Intel systems and from owners of much older Intel systems to second hand 12th/13th/14th CPUs.
so I guess all of this is good news for intel.
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You see, in a duopoly, the best thing for consumers would be a 50%/50% split in marketshare, therefore anything that moves the market further away from that is OBJECTIVELY bad for consumers...that means we should all be LAMENTING all those "advantages" for Intel you've laid out.
The upcoming quarterly earning reports are going to be quite interesting!
Of course, Intel rather would like to offer a comparable replacement in a SKU of similar fashion to satisfy the RMAs – Which means, if they ran out of replacement-SKUs already, it's going to cost them dearly and it could end up costing them hundreds of millions or even billions of profits … Depending on how severe the situation is for them.
They'd lose like 3-5× the money and the very profit they already made doing so! Since basically the only way they can keep most of the shady profit, is giving up a comparable SKU (thus, only have to write off the production-costs of that once produced yet now failed CPU). And they just can't run away from it …
Shareholders and especially investors are going to demand actual numbers on the 13th and 14th Gen-debacle (and underlying via-oxidation issues), and how long further and far-reaching the fall-out will be in any future and how much it will costs them in the long run going forward – With the extended warranty, Intel basically just kicked the lion-share of the problem's impacts just down the line.
Yet, the thing is, Intel is legally obligated to reimburse over the given amount either directly or through proxy (by their already quite fed-up retail- and business-partners). And no, they just can't refund the amount of e.g. a Tray-CPU's worth, when the CPU the consumer has bought, was purchased as a boxed-version one.
Since they're in fact legally obligated to either reimburse/refund the monetary value of the purchase, or replace it with 'a comparable SKU of similar fashion' …
Well, unless Intel is eager to catch another pocketful of legal sunshine aka class-action law-suits, of course.
OEMs are already at a loss and really don't like the aftermath of shuffling defective and 'safe' SKUs and all the logistics, only to end up doing the same once again in a couple of months … That's when the channel just shoves back the whole inventory and Intel has to reimburse them, including the costs of Intel-inflicted logistics atop.
Might end up quite nasty for Intel as a whole. Since we're already at a point, where the public (as enthusiasts) has now a greater interest in the earnings report's transcripts (which has been literally unheard of for a consumer-base of a manufacturer) and given details will end up being on the forefront of news-outlets (just like the recent yield-rate estimate did). If they reveal some ugly percentage of defects and RMAs, people might end up rushing to RMA their processors even more and to a higher degree, than they already did and further putting fuel on the fire Intel tried to put out with the longer warranty.
Right now, most have probably calmed their nerves with that microcode-update as some peace of mind. It might end up becoming a piece of mint quite soon!
I'd think they'd next offer either full refund or offer a comparable 12th Gen-SKU of similar fashion and reimburse the difference (at least, it's the same 1700-socket and the consumer just put it in place and carry on), if they even have such still anywhere in stock? Then again, it's only a matter of time until the upper end of 12th Gen-SKUs are depleted also and they then have no other option but to outright refund immediately, no questions asked. What a show…
Edith just wanted to note some short rough estimate over the costs over potential RMAs involved, based on the arithmetic average of both Gens' ASPs, for having …
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/intel-ships-0x129-microcode-update-for-13th-and-14th-generation-processors-with-stability-issues.325443/
AMD quite immediately acknowledged the bug, expressively mentioned possible affected batches (Ryzen 1xxx, produced before week 33 in 2017; Intel refuses to acknowledge the actual batches being affected by via-oxidation ever since!), tried to retrieve affected batches back from the channel and offered to freely send in a replacement-SKU. They even did so later on and send out free Upgrade-CPUs for when people got a board with older incompatible BIOS, to return the CPU afterwards. Intel never did any of that AFAIK.
Yet it were the media-outlets, which blew the issue totally out of proportion (same as the RX480 wattage-issue) and deliberately harmed the products reputation, when similar things happened before and virtually no-one cared. Media's picturing was outright defamatory, as AMD acknowledged the segfault-bug and replaced given SKUs free of charge.I know, might come across as mean, but nothing what comes for Intel isn't well deserved.
Intel now only has to endure exactly that, what they lashed out to consumers and their business-customers already for years to decades.
Though it's literally deserved. Because since decades, the Intel board has worked really, really hard to antagonize pretty much everybody in the industry and reach that 'goal' to anger pretty much everyone and most of their customers, right?
Not only that, pretty much no other company has been playing this dirty and been so blatantly corrupt in their doings as Intel has been ever since, even GM or GE in their darkest days or Boeing, not even Broadcom hasn't been nearly as cut-throat (and they really try hard on this now). Others are mainly greedy, yet Intel has always been deliberately sh!tty and wilfully wicked, even if they had no need for it.
It's like as if they really just love being arseholes and have a really hard time getting their act together for being at leat nice once a year (to stop bullying the little sister and smack their little brother just for fun). They're often outright malicious while others are just merely mischievous. Even Apple can be quite arrogant and spiteful at times, but even they just know when it's enough and they may anger unnecessarily and start to wreck havoc. Yet Intel worked really hard to be that way from the beginning.
It's just like people sometimes remember being effed over and over again, until blatant hate amounts to rage, deservedly so.
Since whenever Intel has done something awful, they always made it worse through their actions immediately after and lately literally p!ssed off millions of their own customers by again secretly hiding defects again and shoved broken products into the shelves as if nothing happened. Never mind being single-handedly responsible for the industry's single-biggest security-flaws they also tried to haven been swept under the rug for the better part of a year. They really have no-one but themselves to blame.
Also, that German schadenfreude is not to wish ill intent onto someone but the exact contrary: Schadenfreude is the mere glee over someone else who has been really awful for a long time and somehow always got away with it – until he finally gets his karma. Schadenfreude is merely joy of justice being finally served towards the right (or rather bad) one.
Also, if anyone has damaged their reputation, it weren't their nay-sayers but Intel in and of itself first and foremost. The laugh is always on the loser.
Since Intel has torpedoed their own credibility for decades in finest salami tactics by always admitting bit by bit to what was already known and undisputable anyway and especially when it comes to nodes, processes, yields and general Chip'nStuff in the Foundry-site of things, they've basically tarnished their own trustworthiness with every statement of theirs – Always backpedaling, declare old road-maps as obsolete and issue new changed ones and shifting the goals, twisting words and refuting 'bad rumours' within hours on Twitter (only to later reveal, that these were in fact accurate, by the time these were made) and constantly re-issue new plans all of a sudden, as soon as something was about to be due, and their never-ending delays en masse, of course.
You can only fool for so long, until all believability is lost and people start making their own assumptions – If the former then plausibility-based thought-of future happenings even begin to render more likely to be true in the end, you're basically finished …
Talking about dangerously lethal cuts and self-inflicted wounds being tried to stop from bleeding with vigorously salted patches, while 'em trying to heal … and then wonder why it takes so long and the debt holders alongside the official bailiffs are come knocking.
You really just can't make up their stupid, they have to constantly display it instead.
That being said, there had to be a blatant sudden fall-out some day in the future to begin with from day one … Since they never ever came clean.
Intel's management wilfully passed up every chance for the truth, deliberately rejected every given opportunity to acknowledge delaying defects and refused to straighten things out with their investors and the public about their manufacturing-issues and publicly confess and acknowledge their former shady secrets for years to come.
They never wanted to put their cards on the table, despite being caught with their trousers down more than once. People called their bluff since years.
Now the sheriffs arrived, try to calm the enraged crowd and forces Intel at gunpoint to clear their pockets and leave them with their pockets turned inside out for good …
Let's hope the criminals get thrown into jail for more than a few nights.It's not only that bad decisions have bad consequences – Every decision has consequences after all, and you can't run away from it.
Take their handling of the shortage before the bug, which Intel's board used to enrich themselves with when everyone had to buy Intel's CPUs due their HT and cluster-F of security-flaws. It's purely outraging, how utterly disgusting Intel handled all this and even increased their price-tags for the given SKUs in high demand partially by 2× when everyone was in short of CPUs and demand was sky-high, instead of giving at least rebates for the eff-ups Intel caused them in the first place.
Let's not forget how shady Intel played them and what their fall-out was at hyperscalers and the enterprise in general over Intel's Meltdown, Spectre, Foreshadow and alike and when their broken Hyper-Threading additionally resulted in the installed computing-power to be basically halved overnight!
What did Intel do? Intel didn't cut price-tags, at least not immediately – They did the exact opposite! Intel increased their price-tags for some huge short-term profits, only to kill their own customer-base in the long run. These operators and hyperscalers and the business operating these CPUs on any larger scale, had to basically order the same amount of CPUs again (after HT had to be deactivated from one day to the other, due to excessive security-threats, especially on anything virtualized).
That's the worst part, Intel didn't even really cut prices or slash their bill as a short-term solution – Intel was even stupid enough to increase their Xeon price-tags IIRC by like 2-3× for Cooper/Ice/Cascade Lake, when the self-inflicted shortages in 2018-2019 hit and enterprise needed to double down on Intel cores for their security-flaws, broken HT (making it necessary to buy the same amount of compute-power, broken HT halved the cores overnight) and whatnot.
They where too sure their standing weren't really affected by it in the long run and that their brand would be still strong at enterprise customers, since “Nobody got fired for buying IBM Intel!”, right? Intel as always was so sure of themselves and just thought that a few rebates here and there would make it – That their OEMs would do the rest, all the while listening to “With a little help from my friends” …
Yet later on, when pretty much no-one was buying Intel-stuff anymore and was replacing Intel's Xeons with AMD's Epyc, then they slashed price-tags suddenly by a lot on top off huge rebates, since they just had to by then, to even merely compete. Though the damage was already done at customers …
Stupid enough, Intel declared the utter revenue-increases during the shortages as a new base-line and was propagating it as the 'new normal', with their insanely profitable shortages even before the bug hit (which Intel somehow couldn't really participate from …). It was so daft and dangerous for Intel to even state that, it backfired hard – The shortage and bug only saved them time.
Well, turned out all the Big Business remembered and took whatever toll and shouldered however costs, to make darn sure, that they're never again in a position to be so painstakingly exploited by a single monopoly-holding company. That company was Intel. Since it p!ssed of a lot of their (enterprise-) customers, who made sure, that they won't ever be any dependent on Intel in the first place – Hence the following run on everything ARM.
Now, these companies are never again even consider Intel as a viable option in the first place. Not because x86 is bad (or AMD64/x86_64 for that matter), but they're basically done with being robbed by Intel for decades … Now Intel has lost each and everyone of them as a client, forever. As these former Intel-customers would rather take Amazon's AWS, AMD's Epyc or Ampere's Altra/Max or anything else (or even develop their own silicon), than ever again take anything Intel.
Yet now they're 'somehow' in trouble with profit-declines in datacenter, which where more than once +99%↓. As if no-one could've seen the results of it…
Now they're 'suddenly' in trouble … Among else, since they couldn't resist to eff it all up, by getting greedy at the single-worst time in their history and even milked their crying customers after having their Intel-labeled stuff basically go haywire overnight. Yet instead of at least showing some gratitude and humbleness for NOT being replaced by competitors at customers after their countless eff-ups, they f—ed customers over even harder.
So here they are, having major revenue-declines, profit outright collapsing in datacenter and being tight on money.
Luckily, no-one on God's green earth saw that coming from aeons away, how that could possibly happen to blow up in their face!
This is bigger than what you think. They are facing lawsuits over this. The government is investigating whether they can be trusted to steward the billions of dollars responsibly that was previously approved for them from the CHIPS Act. Their stock is down almost 50% in the last couple of months and this is just the beginning of their financial woes.
I don't see a minor setback in this mess. I see a clusterfuck created by Intel themselves.
Intel had to spend some time investigating to find the cause which was not the oxidation incident, that was something that had happened but not related, so this is what I mean by blowing things up. Changing one story into another. They cannot tell customers what was wrong when they didnt know themselves.
It is also basic logic, why would Intel want people to keep speculating wild theories in the news, when they could shut it up by releasing a statement with the cause and a mitigation, which is what they did in August.
The possibly kinda doesn't make it an absolute statement, anything is possible. Something with 0.0001% chance is possible.
But at the same time, we all kinda knew what he what he was trying to say, and it shouldn't be up to you, to provide not only evidence, but proof, a much stronger word, implying 100% certainty, that 64k was wrong.
I mean if they weren't investigating, then they were working on figuring out a fix/delaying measure that didn't affect performance too much. I mean its one or the other.
Its likely intel knew they were pushing it with the voltages... but intel has done that before and its been fine. Doesn't necessarily mean they knew they were pushing out defective products.
Awe man this is giving me a headache. Can't we just all just agree that nobody knows for certain the exact details? Maybe it will all come out one day.... possibly during discovery? But until then. We are just speculating.
What do we really know as facts? Intel cpus are facing degradation/instability. High end skus have higher incident rates. Voltage is involved. Thats about it, that all we know for certain. Anything beyond that is some amount of conjecture. Maybe ringbus is involved. Maybe the imc is. Who knows?Right, because thats impossible. Hence the extended rma dates.
Agree with iameatingjam really, we just accept it for what has been reported, and yes maybe in several years time we might hear a different story, that will be a new subject if and when it happens.