it's a overbinning (greed) problem at intel for sure, but it's obvious that it's being sensationalized.
Just for clarity, no chips are "more binned" or "overbinned". Binning is simply the process of sorting a mass-produced product by qualities for product segmentation. All microchips are "binned", an i9-14900K is no more "binned" than a i5-14600.
Whether Intel makes lots of small bins that goes into a single SKU, or they make one large bin with a lot of variance ranging from lower quality samples to golden samples, I don't know.
But they do most certainly have this data for every single chip, and they would also know if they changed the binning at some time and it had unintentional effects on RMAs. So if it were the case that the lower quality xx% of i9-14900Ks were overrepresented in RMAs, but the rest were normal return rates, they would be able to identify this problem very quickly and recall those serial numbers. Similarly, if there were certain batches or production lines which had extremely high failure rates, they could have identified this a long time ago. Remember, these chips were run through qualification two years ago, but the widespread problems only showed up fairly recently (this year?).
I don't think the problem is really that simple. While silicon quality probably plays a role in when/if the symptoms arrive, their binning is likely not the main cause, but rather the aggressive application of voltage combined with all the various design considerations.
Same thing happened with AMD 7900XTX coolers, Nvidia power connectors, 7800x3ds exploding... it's "THE END OF THE WORLD" and then everyone forgets about it and moves on and in the end the issue ended up being a fraction of the apocalypse that it was made out to be.
Most have long forgotten that the great Sandy Bridge was a horrible disaster in the beginning. Bad chips, defective chipsets and even many motherboards with major issues, and it kept on going for like six months or so. So many swore not to buy Intel ever again…
When they eventually got the issues sorted out, the platform turned out pretty great.
Also the return rate for 13th and 14th gen remains 3-4x higher that other models. I very much doubt all these people returning them are doing so because of the news.
Considering how low RMA rates for CPUs normally are compared to other PC parts, it wouldn't take much to "dominate" those statistics. If the return rates were like 20% or 50% like some have suggested, the big systems integrators would have stopped selling these a long time ago, that overhead would simply just kill their margins.
, instead.
