Intel Pauses Some Sapphire Rapids Xeon Shipments Amid Hardware Bug

[AleksandarK]

Intel's Xeon Sapphire Rapids processors have been coated with numerous delays, and today, we learn that the company is stopping shipment of certain SKUs, mostly driven by the discovery of a new bug. After plenty of delays, Sapphire Rapids has been shipping for a few months now. However, SemiAnalysis's Chief Analyst, Dylan Patel, tipped Tom's Hardware that certain SKUs haven't been shipping since June. What this translates into is the additional delays to the 4th generation Xeon Scalable line, which was already in a difficult position. Some estimates claimed that it did 12 steppings, meaning that it took 11 times to perfect the silicon for the mass production run. The impacted CPUs are models with up to 32 cores, based on MCC die. These SKUs represent a huge amount of the total Xeon volume.

Intel's spokesperson published the following statement for Tom's Hardware: "We became aware of an issue on a subset of 4th Generation Intel Xeon Medium Core Count Processors (SPR-MCC) that could interrupt system operation under certain conditions and are actively investigating. This issue was not observed when running commercially available software, and other 4th Generation Intel Xeon processor SKUs (i.e., XCC and HBM) have not exhibited the issue. Out of an abundance of caution, we did temporarily pause some SPR MCC shipments while we gained confidence in the expected firmware mitigation and expect to release remaining shipments shortly."



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[fancucker]

>firmware correctable errata
literally a nothing-burger

 

[tabascosauz]

EMIB teething issues? Or core?

 

[dj-electric]

Sapphire Rapids have to be the most expensive sinkhole ive ever seen Intel dump money into. Holy moly.
We've seen it in once piece 3 whole years ago at this point

 

[sLowEnd]

Sapphire Rapids have to be the most expensive sinkhole ive ever seen Intel dump money into. Holy moly.
We've seen it in once piece 3 whole years ago at this point

I wonder how much it cost Intel in comparison to Itanium? lol

But yeah, Sapphire Rapids has been a very difficult product for Intel, it seems.

 

[Nioktefe]

EMIB teething issues? Or core?

EMIB is not used on the MCC die as it's monolithic

 

[mechtech]

Why didn’t they do that with all those crappy 2.5gbe network chips they sent out????

 

[fancucker]

Why didn’t they do that with all those crappy 2.5gbe network chips they sent out????

Just disable EEE mode.
The problem lies mostly with motherboard manufacturers and their faulty implementation

 

[A&P211]

Will this come out to the general consumer in the future. I understand that Sapphire Rapids are chiplet designs.

 

[Wirko]

This lil' black square has bothered me since I first saw the magnificent Rapids. Must be some copy protection chip, just like the ones on HP/Canon/Epson/everybody's inkjet cartridges.

 

[Daven]

This lil' black square has bothered me since I first saw the magnificent Rapids. Must be some copy protection chip, just like the ones on HP/Canon/Epson/everybody's inkjet cartridges.
View attachment 303035

It was put there by aliens.

 

[ncrs]

This lil' black square has bothered me since I first saw the magnificent Rapids. Must be some copy protection chip, just like the ones on HP/Canon/Epson/everybody's inkjet cartridges.
View attachment 303035

In earlier engineering samples that die was labeled - apparently it's an Altera MAX 10 FPGA.

 

[Wirko]

In earlier engineering samples that die was labeled - apparently it's an Altera MAX 10 FPGA.

Good find!

 

[ZoneDymo]

yikez