Dylan Browne, an Unreal Engine Supervisor and Feature Film VFX at the ModelFarm visual effects studio, posted on X that his company is experiencing a 50% failure rate for systems powered by Intel's Core i9-13900K and 14900K processors. As a result, the company is deploying AMD's as-yet-unreleased Zen 5 Ryzen 9 9950X processors in place of Intel-powered solutions.
Intel says they have a fix, but it won't be released until mid August. And the failures are actually destroying the chips. From Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony... Daily News Stuff 24 July 2024: Ameliope Morson Edition.
The Intel problem - as finally confirmed by Intel, is twofold:
First, the CPUs ask the motherboard for voltage levels high enough to fry their circuits.
Second, the chips rust from the inside.
If your chip has been fried, it will need to be replaced.
Intel has also been rejecting warranty returns despite knowing of these problems internally for some time.
Which is just plain mean.
That Intel story is disgusting. Not that they effed up and put out a bad design but that they're actively hurting customers by not doing warranty returns. That's the kind of thing that should get everyone actively refusing to do business with them. The kind of thing that should destroy them as a company.
ReplyDeleteConfidential: we all screw up. It's how you unscrew things that defines if you're decent or not - and worth doing business with or not.
They have a fix for the voltage problem. Or they will in a few weeks. Updating firmware isn't as easy as scheduling stuff on Patch Tuesday, but at least there will be a fix. I'm not sure what the rusting situation is, and that is unlikely to get a fix. Which means that they would need to replace any still under warranty. The 14900K was released in 2023 so there are probably a fair few that qualify. They question is, "replaced with what?"
DeleteIntel has been losing in the gaming sphere for a while, at least on the benchmark front. They still have the consumers' awareness, much more the AMD, even though dollar for dollar AMD wins - again in the benchmarks - hands down.
DeleteAnd you're absolutely right. Everyone screws up, it's what you do next that matters. Intel has been screwing people over which tells me they have no moral center