I assumed I had just got a bad unit. Now I’m wondering if this might have been the cause.
Glad I switched to using AMD. Although some RUMINT indicating quality assurance troubles in 9000 series though. They were supposed to push out new product by end of July. But delayed to mid August.
No system integrator has the infrastructure to handle replacing vast numbers of CPU's and entire systems where the CPU is soldered to the mainboard and cannot be replaced.
Also, there's no way this problem suddenly snuck up on them without warning. They had customers returning massive numbers of them, but Intel kept selling defective units instead of stopping production. They absolutely knew about this as soon as problems started popping up.
A microcode patch may make it stable, but if you have a dud, you have a dud. There's no way to patch around defects in manufacturing of this nature. Microcode can reduce frequencies, but a defective part is still defective.
How PG still has a job is beyond me.
What people ought do is just undervolt the chip by .05 at least and reduce the clock speed.
Intel lost their engineering abilities years ago. Got eaten by sharks.
More conservative voltages will only lead to small (low single-digit) performance decreases, right? Isn't that less significant a performance hit than meltdown countermeasures? The only way I can imagine performance really tanking would be if Intel has to severely down-rate supported memory speeds as well, if the ring bus can't handle higher memory speeds at slightly reduced voltages.
> If your son has requested a new "processor" from a company called "AMD", this is genuine cause for alarm. AMD is a third-world based company who make inferior, "knock-off" copies of American processor chips
[1] https://gwern.net/doc/cs/security/2001-12-02-treginaldgibbon...
- it may have to do with oxidation of metallic copper deposited inside through-sillicon via(TSV)
- it may have to do with improper connection between die and substrate(that hard green plate) causing higher resistance and temperature somewhere, which is by the way the true limiting factor for socket Tjmax
- it could have to do with VCORE values used to meet the performance target being too high for the on-die ring bus logic including L1
- it is possibly related to big-little heterogeneous configuration and how voltages for big-core and little-core/uncore/IO are generated
- I've heard they had an HVAC outage in one of US fabs and it ruined some dies
- Yeah they just flew too close to the Sun, frankly
- ...
I have absolutely no skin in this game, and my question is: are there any more plausible technobabbly stories around? It all sounds intriguing to me. Some of it could be correct or relevant.
> Intel will continue working with its customers on Via Oxidation-related reports and ensure that they are fully supported in the exchange process.
Intel is refusing to disclose serial number ranges of the fundamentally defective processors?
Followup question: How do owners of that series of CPU, who suspect theirs is one of the defective units, exchange it for a non-defective CPU before it fails?