What began as a few reports of instability in Intel’s Raptor Lake desktop chips last year has grown into a much larger story in recent months. Facing the largest client chip instability failure in decades, Intel has been under increasing pressure to find and fix the root cause of the problem as claims of chip damage pile up and rumors swirl around Intel’s silence. But finally, Intel’s latest saga appears to be coming to an end. The company announced today that it has discovered the cause of the issue and will roll out a microcode fix next month to resolve the issue.
Officially, Intel has been working to identify the cause of desktop Raptor Lake instability issues since at least February of this year, possibly even longer. In the meantime, they have found some correlating factors. Stop using silly power settings in out-of-the-box configurations,and Enhanced Thermal Velocity Boost (eTVB) voltage related bug But neither factor was the smoking gun that drove all this, and Intel continued to investigate the root cause behind closed doors, leading to an awkward public silence.
But Intel’s investigation appears to have finally come to an end, although the company has yet to release any conclusive evidence. The latest update was posted on the company’s community websiteIntel has finally identified the root cause and is working on a fix.
According to the company’s announcement, Intel has traced the cause of the instability issue to “elevated operating voltage,” which is ultimately due to a flawed algorithm in Intel’s microcode that requests the wrong voltage. As a result, Intel will be able to fix the issue through a new microcode update, which is pending validation and is expected to be released in mid-August.
Intel has provided a microcode patch that addresses the root cause of high voltage exposure and continues to validate to ensure that the instability scenarios reported to Intel for Core 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors are addressed. Intel is currently targeting to release the patch to partners in mid-August following full validation.
Intel is working with customers to resolve this issue and urges customers currently experiencing instability issues with Intel Core 13th Gen/14th Gen Desktop Processors to continue contacting Intel Customer Support for further assistance.
–Intel Community Post
While the Raptor Lake instability issues and the need to fix them are no good for Intel, the fact that the issues are caused by (or at least can be fixed with) microcode is the best outcome the company can hope for. Of the full range of possible causes, microcode is the easiest to fix at scale; microcode updates have already been distributed via OS updates, and chips of a given stepping (millions in all) are all running the same microcode. Even a motherboard BIOS-related issue would be much harder to fix given the large number of different boards on the market, let alone a true hardware defect that would require Intel to replace even more chips than they already have.
Still, we’d be remiss if we didn’t note that microcode is frequently used to mask problems deeper within the processor. Most notably, Meltdown/Spectre Some of these were fixed years ago, so Intel has officially attributed this issue to a microcode bug, but modern CPUs have several more layers that may also be affecting it. On that note, because so many different issues can be mitigated with microcode, the microcode fix gives us very little information about the bug and how the fix affects performance.
But for now, Intel is focused on communicating that they have a fix and establishing a timeline for distributing it – this issue has certainly caused them a lot of upset over the past year and will continue to do so for at least another month.
In the meantime, we’ve reached out to Intel representatives to see if the company will release any additional details about the voltage bug and its fix. “Increased operating voltage” alone is not a satisfactory answer. Given the unprecedented nature of this issue, we hope Intel will share additional details about what is happening and how they plan to prevent this in the future.
Intel also confirms that via oxidation manufacturing issues affected early Raptor Lake chips
While unrelated to this news, Intel has also made several statements to the press and public in the past 48 hours regarding chip instability that are also worthy of note.
First of all, until Intel’s official root cause analysis of the desktop Raptor Lake instability issues, at the time, they couldn’t rule out the possibility that the root cause of the issue was some kind of hardware defect. The answer turns out to be “no,” with a pretty significant “but” in it.
After all, Intel did An enhanced version of the Intel 7 process node used to build Raptor Lake had an initial manufacturing defect. Intel posted this on Reddit this afternoon.The “via oxidation manufacturing issue” has been resolved in 2023. However, despite the timing being questionable, Intel says this is separate from the microcode issue that’s been causing instability in its Raptor Lake desktop processors to this day.
Long answer: We know that a via oxidation manufacturing issue affected some early Intel Core 13th Generation Desktop Processors, however the issue had an underlying cause and was addressed with manufacturing improvements and screens in 2023. We also investigated this issue through instability reports of Intel Core 13th Generation Desktop Processors, but our analysis to date has found that only a small minority of instability reports can be linked to a manufacturing issue.
For the instability issue, we have provided a microcode patch that addresses high voltage exposure, which is a key component of the instability issue. We are currently validating the microcode patch to ensure that it resolves the instability issue on 13G/14G.
–Intel Reddit Post
In the end, Intel said it noticed the problem early on and that only a small percentage of Raptor Lake chips were affected by the via oxide manufacturing defect. This is little consolation to Raptor Lake owners who are already worried about instability issues, but it is at least helpful that the issue is publicly documented. Typically, such early problems go unmentioned, because even in the best case scenario, some chips will inevitably fail early.
Unfortunately, Intel’s announcement doesn’t provide any further details on what the problem is or how it might manifest itself other than additional instability, but ultimately, as with the microcode voltage issue, the fix for affected chips will likely be to RMA them to Intel to get a replacement.
Laptops not affected by Raptor Lake microcode issue
Finally, prior to the previous two statements, Intel also released a statement: Digital Trends Intel’s 13Number Third-generation Core mobile CPUs were also affected by what is now known to be a microcode flaw. In a statement, Intel denied these claims and said its laptop chips were not experiencing similar instability issues.
–Digital Trends at Intel
Instead, Intel said the laptop instability issues were due to general hardware and software issues, and claimed that the laptops were not experiencing any instability issues. It is unclear whether this statement describes the via oxide manufacturing issues.Number Gen Core Mobile parts are Raptor Lake, but this lines up with Intel’s statements from earlier this year, and the company has always explicitly cited instability issues as a desktop problem.
