Intel confirms fears about its biggest failure in years

Intel recently confirmed it has found the root cause of the instability problems reported by users of its 13th and 14th Gen CPUs, but, unfortunately, the chipmaker has made things quite confusing with a convoluted and seemingly contradictory response.

Intel officially published a statement about the instability reports for its Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs in the 13th and 14th Gen families. These instability reports have been stacking up for months now, and very little has been done on Intel's part to provide remedies for customers of the affected products or an explanation as to why the faults are occurring. Now, we have official confirmation from Intel that excessive voltage and oxidation are part of the problem.

The chipmaker posted a statement about the instability problems, citing an issue in the microcode algorithm that is causing incorrect voltage requests to the processor, resulting in elevated voltages. Intel said it was targeting mid-August for a microcode algorithm update. Notably, this statement didn't mention anything about oxidation, leading many to believe voltage was the root cause, and general instability problems will all be ironed out in an update in August.

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However, Intel took to Reddit to reveal oxidation was also a problem discovered by internal testing. Notably, Intel writes it discovered an Oxidation manufacturing issue in 2023 and said it was only found on Intel Core 13th Gen processors.

Additionally, Intel writes the Oxidation manufacturing issue, "It's not related to the instability issue," but writes later the same statement, "We have also looked at it from the instability reports on Intel Core 13th Gen desktop processors and the analysis to-date has determined that only a small number of instability reports can be connected to the manufacturing issue." Intel writes Oxidation was both not an issue and an issue.

Intel writes it has fixed the Oxidation problem, but, unfortunately, the chipmaker didn't provide a date range for the CPUs manufactured during the period where this was a problem. A date range of faulty CPUs manufactured could be used to inform customers if they own a faulty CPU.

• Read more: Intel officially responds to 13th and 14th Gen CPU instability reports