What started last year as a handful of instability reports with Intel’s Raptor Lake desktop chips has turned into a much bigger saga over the past few months. Faced with the biggest client chip instability hurdle in decades, Intel is under increasing pressure to understand the root cause of the problem and fix it, as claims of damaged chips pile up and rumors swirl amid Intel’s silence. But it finally looks like Intel’s latest saga is about to come to an end, as the company announced today that it has discovered the cause of the problem and will release a microcode patch next month to resolve it.
Officially, Intel has been working to identify the cause of desktop Raptor Lake instability issues since at least February of this year, if not earlier. Meanwhile, they’ve found several correlating factors—telling motherboard vendors to stop using ridiculous power settings for their out-of-the-box configurations and finding a voltage-related bug in Enhanced Thermal Velocity Boost (eTVB)—but none of these factors were the smoking gun that set it all off. All this led Intel to continue to search for the root cause in private and very awkward silence to fill the gaps in society.
But it looks like Intel’s quest is finally over — even if Intel hasn’t put the smoking gun on public display just yet. According to a new update posted on the company’s community website, Intel has finally determined the root cause and is working on a fix.
According to the company’s announcement, Intel traced the cause of the instability issue to “increased operating voltages,” which basically stemmed from a faulty algorithm in Intel’s microcode that required the wrong voltage. Therefore, Intel will be able to resolve the issue through a new microcode update, which, pending validation, is expected to be released in mid-August.
Intel is shipping a microcode patch that addresses the root cause of the increased voltage exposure. We are continuing validation to ensure that the instability scenarios reported to Intel regarding its 13th/14th generation Core desktop processors are addressed. Intel is currently targeting mid-August to release patches to partners after full validation.
Intel is committed to making this right with our customers, and we continue to ask any customers who are currently experiencing instability issues with their 13th/14th Gen Intel Core desktop processors to contact Intel Customer Support for further assistance.
– Intel Community Post
And while there’s nothing good for Intel about the Raptor Lake instability issues or the need to fix them, the fact that the problem can be attributed to (or at least fixed by) microcode is the best possible outcome the company can hope for. hopes. Across the spectrum of potential causes, microcode is the easiest to fix at scale – microcode updates are now distributed via OS updates, and all chips at a given rung (millions in total) run the same microcode. Even a motherboard BIOS problem would be much harder to fix given the sheer number of different boards out there, never mind a true hardware defect that would force Intel to replace even more chips than they already have.
However, we’d be remiss if we didn’t note that microcode is regularly used to cover up issues further down the processor, as we most famously saw with the Meltdown/Spectre fixes a few years ago. So while Intel has publicly attributed the problem to bugs in the microcode, there are a few more layers in the onion that is modern processors that may play a role. In this respect, patching microcode provides the least insight into the bug and the performance implications of patching it, because microcode can be used to mitigate so many different problems.
But for now Intel’s focus is to announce that they have a fix and establish a timeline for its rollout. The issue has certainly caused them a lot of consternation over the past year and will continue to do so for at least another month.
In the meantime, we’ve reached out to our contacts at Intel to see if the company will release further details about the voltage bug and its fix. “Increased operating voltages” is not a very satisfactory answer on its own, and given the unprecedented nature of the problem, we hope that Intel will be able to share more details about what is happening and how Intel will prevent it in the future.
Intel also confirms that early Raptor Lake chips are affected by an oxidation problem
Along with this news, Intel also made several other statements regarding chip instability to the press and public over the past 48 hours that also deserve some attention.
First and foremost, leading up to Intel’s official root cause analysis of the desktop Raptor Lake’s instability issues, one possibility that couldn’t be ruled out at the time was that the root cause of the problem was some sort of hardware defect. And while the answer to that turned out to be no, there is also a rather important but.
As it turns out, Intel I did have an early manufacturing defect in the upgraded version of the Intel 7 process node used to build Raptor Lake. According to a post made by Intel to Reddit this afternoon, an “oxidation manufacturing issue” was addressed in 2023. However, despite the suspicious timing, Intel says this is separate from the microcode issue causing instability issues in the Raptor desktop processors Lake until today.
Long answer: We can confirm that the oxidation manufacturing issue has affected some early Intel Core 13th Gen desktop processors. However, the issue was rooted and resolved with manufacturing improvements and screens in 2023. We also looked at it from instability reports on 13th Gen Intel Core desktop processors, and analysis so far found that only a small number of instability reports could be related with the production problem.
For the instability issue, we deliver a microcode fix that addresses the exposure to increased voltage, which is a key element of the instability issue. We are currently checking the microcode patch to ensure that the instability issues for the 13th/14th generation are addressed.
-Intel Reddit Post
Ultimately, Intel says they caught the problem early and that only a small number of Raptor Lakes were affected by the oxidation manufacturing defect. Which will hardly be any comfort to Raptor Lake owners who are already worried about the instability issue, but if nothing else, it’s helpful that the problem is publicly documented. Usually, these kinds of early teething problems go unreported because even in the best case scenario, some chips inevitably fail prematurely.
Unfortunately, Intel’s disclosure here doesn’t offer any further details on what the issue is or how it manifests itself beyond additional instability. Although at the end of the day, as with the microcode voltage issue, the solution for all affected chips will be to RMA with Intel to get a replacement.
Laptops not affected by Raptor Lake microcode issue
Finally, before the previous two statements, Intel also released a statement to Digital trends and several other technology websites over the weekend, responding to allegations that Intel’s 13th generation of Core mobile processors were also affected by what we now know to be a microcode flaw. In the statement, Intel refuted these claims, saying that laptop chips do not suffer from the same instability problem.
– Intel representative at Digital Trends
Instead, Intel attributes all of the laptop’s instability issues to typical hardware and software issues—essentially claiming that they’re not experiencing increased instability issues. It is unclear whether this statement explains the problem of production by oxidation (largely because not all 13th Gen Core mobile parts are Raptor Lake), but this is consistent with Intel’s statements from earlier this year, which always specifically cite instability issues as desktop issues.
