Intel and AMD CPU failure rates per month revealed in new report

A business that sells a mixture of custom and preconfigured computer systems for desktops, workstations, and servers has released a report revealing its failure rate for CPUs in the wake of the recent Intel fiasco.

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The CPU industry is currently on fire, with recent damaging reports about the instability issues with Intel's 14th and 13th Gen CPUs. There has been quite a lot of ambiguity around the fix for the problem, which has been linked to a microcode issue that resulted in excess voltage requests and general instability. Intel has said it's issuing a microcode update in mid-August that will remedy the problem. Unfortunately, Intel still hasn't said how significant the issue's impact is and how many CPUs are affected.

The general concern is the breadth of the impact across SKUs and generations, which was exacerbated by developers coming out and saying they have seen failure rates of up to 100% across 14th and 13th Gen CPUs. Now, Puget Systems, a custom and preconfigured computer system business has published a report revealing its internal failure rate estimations.

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According to the report, Intel's 14th and 13th Gen CPUs have drastically higher failure rates than previous generations, but the failure rate, at least internally for Puget, was only slightly higher than Intel's 11th Gen CPUs. Puget Systems found that 14th and 13th Gen CPUs have a "shop failure rate" of less than 2%, with AMD's Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen 7000 series having higher failure rates than 14th and 13th Gen CPUs.

These results are contrary to what is being widely reported in the media, which begs the question as to why Puget's findings are so different. According to the report, Puget System associates these low failure rates with the fact it uses its own parameters with its CPUs rather than the recommended settings from AMD and Intel. However, Puget Systems' guidelines are developed "with an emphasis on following Intel and AMD guidelines."

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In the majority of cases, we are staying the course for now. Various BIOS updates have been launched by motherboard manufacturers to provide more conservative power settings, but in our opinion, they don't quite hit the mark. They are either too conservative in some places (leading to unacceptable loss in performance) or they are not conservative enough. We trust our internally developed settings more. We also are concerned with the rise in failure rate, but it is not at a level of severity that changes our CPU recommendations for our customer workflows.

We will immediately validate the Intel microcode update when it is released. We will start with internal testing for stability and performance. If it passes that testing, we will begin using it on our shipping configurations as soon as possible.

We will contact all our affected customers to provide the Intel microcode update. We will do this after gaining some internal experience and confidence with the update, and have developed detailed guides on how to install it while preserving our recommended BIOS settings.

We are extending our warranty to 3 years for all customers affected by this issue, regardless of warranty purchased. With a Puget Systems PC, you should be able to count on it working for you. If we no longer have supply of 13th or 14th Gen processors, we'll upgrade you to a more current generation.

Writes Puget Systems