Intel Will Give Two Years of Additional Warranty on Crash-Prone 13th and 14th Gen CPUs (theverge.com) 19
After months of back and forth, Intel has finally agreed to extend the warranty on all affected 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs by an additional two years. This extension increases the warranty period for new boxed Intel CPUs from three to five years. For CPUs pre-installed in systems, Intel directs users to contact their PC's manufacturer for support, maintaining its established channels for warranty claims. The Verge adds: Intel has said that a primary cause of the instability issues for the desktop CPUs was due to an "elevated operating voltage" and that it was working on a patch for mid-August that addresses the root cause of that. But the patch apparently won't fix any damage that's already happened, meaning the best way to fix a damaged chip is to replace it.
Phase 1 extend warranty (Score:3)
Jokes aside this is good but I'm skeptical and I will be avoiding Intel for the foreseeable future. I question whether a company that was already running super lean can fire 15% of its staff and remain functional.
Folks like to point to Twitter but in exchange for those cuts they are now full of the worst sort of trolls and have lost 80% of their revenue having coincidentally cut 80% of their staff...
Re:Phase 1 extend warranty (Score:4, Insightful)
AMD was in a far worse situation a decade ago and went through many rounds of brutal cuts. At some point they got rid of the deadwood and now they have a better CPU than Intel in practically every market. Given time Intel will find their footing, but they may need to let go of their pride first.
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I argued with someone on another tech site 6 months or so ago. This person was a "Gelsinger Groupie".
I wonder his opinion of Gelsinger now?
Re:Phase 1 extend warranty (Score:4, Insightful)
Intel will be more worried about the damage this will do to their business relationships. Some OEMs will be getting large numbers of returns on entire PCs, from irate customers who want them to ship out a replacement first so they can copy their data over...
They will have mountains of used desktops. Can't even replace the CPU and sell them again without eating into their own sales of new computers with discounted year or two old models.
This is what happens when you overclock your CPU. (Score:2, Informative)
They just sold them over-clocked out of the box. I sure hope they can recover from this scandal. Like all the top end CPUs are being pushed as far as they can go to be as fast as possible, but they're not supposed to be sold in a state where they will damage themselves.
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Please do a bit of research to understand the issue. This isn't a case of being sold overclocked out of the box. The issue and the fix for it were voltage excursion related. Intel's CPUs are no more overclocked out of the box than AMD's. They all dynamically clock to a limits envelope. In this case the CPUs exceeded voltage without actually having any change in performance.
Very Curious (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Very Curious (Score:4, Insightful)
None:
A) The voltage excursions were in error. Not mapped for performance.
B) Intel have already issued a parred down performance fix a month or so back. This could be counted but it's not a future downgrade.
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What is a problem though is all affected models are effectively permanently damaged now. There is no way to know by how much until it becomes apparent in use.
Intel are trying to avoid a general recall and replacement program.
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Are you guys still swallowing their press release from last week that they amended immediately after the news cycle already ran it?
I told you all before they amended it and I'm telling you again. This is a hardware problem, and not, as they initially claimed and then backtracked on, a software problem.
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The oxidation issue was only on a select few 13th gen processors that were made in 1 fab over the course of a couple weeks.
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How many lies are you going to accept before you actually act on your reoccurring knowledge that they lie and, you know, stop being a blind fool that believes them just cause? They've never stopped lying. Same old convicted monopolist they always were. They always lied then too.
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That is a bit like asking what the output of a lightbulb is right before it blows up because it's driven with far too much current to last longer.
Whatever performance it will have, it'll have it for a few weeks at most. That number is irrelevant to anyone but overclockers looking for a record. That the system burns out in a few months instead of a few minutes like the light bulb makes the measure not any less worthless.
When survival of the CPU becomes irrelevant, benchmarks become meaningless.
Lack of testing = New American Tech Ethos (Score:3)
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But wouldn't a little more testing would have bought a little more time to help react to this quality issue?
Too bad they probably just fired most of their testing team... LOL
Intel is the new Boeing (Score:3)
I will post this whenever the failures of either company comes up. Big American companies have become fat, lazy and stupid because they are de facto monopolies. They assume they will automatically make a profit. Eventually reality catches up with them, and this kind of thing is the result. The lack of competition in the US is a long term drag on the country.
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