The latest development of the story for Intel’s rather problematic Core i9 processors prone to crashes has not been a good one. When it is generally believed that overly aggressive power profiles may be the cause, latest anecdotes from Level1Techs seems to indicate a much deeper rooted problem than it initially appeared to be, as Intel is still yet to produce a fix many months since the crash has been reported.
It’s Not Just Gamers – Core i9 In Servers Are Failing As Well
Now hang on a second, aren’t servers where datacenter processors like Intel Xeon comes in? You’re correct – but game servers are a different kind of ballgame due to their unique requirements. Part of keeping the multiplayer server working is to handle many low latency commands in very rapid succession, and this is where high single-core clock speed, which the Core i9-13900K and i9-14900K possess, comes in.
According to Wendell of YouTube channel Level1Techs, he obtained crash logs from thousands of servers running these Core i9 processors, and a whopping 50% of them contains some kind of stability errors (mostly decompression errors), despite not running beyond the stock power limits. In fact, these processors run on the server-grade W680 motherboards made by ASUS and Supermicro, so that largely rules out the possibility of motherboards being the root cause.
The numbers are quite telling, too. Of all 1,584 errors logged, 1,431 of them can be attributed to 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 processors, whereas AMD merely has 4 – yes, four. The situation has turned out bad enough that server providers started charging huge support costs (around $1,000 more than AMD equivalents) due to the sheer failure rate of Intel chips, and even advising the customers (game developers) to switch to Ryzen 9 7950X as the chip is “almost always faster anyway.”
Notably, one game developer, Alderon Games, has outright claimed that Intel is selling “defective 13-14th Gen CPUs.” In the statement, founder Matthew Cassells said the following, while advocating for the recall and refund of the affected CPUs:
My team at Alderon Games, working on the multiplayer dinosaur survival game Path of Titans, has been encountering significant problems with Intel CPU stability. These issues, including crashes, instability, and memory corruption, are confined to the 13th and 14th generation processors. Despite all released microcode, BIOS, and firmware updates, the problem remains unresolved.
Over the last 3–4 months, we have observed that CPUs initially working well deteriorate over time, eventually failing. The failure rate we have observed from our own testing is nearly 100%, indicating it’s only a matter of time before affected CPUs fail. This issue is gaining attention from news outlets and has been noted by Fortnite and RAD Game Tools, which powers decompression behind Unreal Engine.
Matthew Cassells, Founder of Alderon Games
Amidst all of this, Intel has yet to provide a clear indication or messaging on what to do next. The company is still struggling to find the root cause of the issues (though some progress have been made), but the lack of communication can be detrimental to the trust from its customers – especially datacenter partners, which once used to be the Chipzilla’s bread and butter during its time of market dominance.
Pokdepinion: Intel really needs to hope this bug is not making its way into Arrow Lake processors. It’ll be very bad for them if that happens.
