998
There is no fix for Intel’s crashing 13th and 14th Gen CPUs — any damage is permanent
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
998 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
59434 readers
4025 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, when I saw that the CPU could pull 250W, I initially thought that it was a misprint in the spec sheet. That is kind of a nutty number. I have a space heater that can run at low at 400W, which is getting into that range, and you can get very low-power space heaters that consume less power than the TDP on that processor. That's an awful lot of heat to be putting into an incredibly small, fragile part.
That being said, I don't believe that Intel intentionally passed the initial QA for the 13th generation thinking that there were problems. They probably thought there was a healthy safety margin. You can certainly blame them for insufficient QA or for how they handled the problem as the issue was ongoing, though.
And you could also have said "this is absurd" at many times in the past when other performance barriers came up. I remember -- a long time ago now -- when the idea of processors that needed active cooling or they would destroy themselves seemed rather alarming and fragile. I mean, fans do fail. Processors capable of at least shutting down on overheat to avoid destroying themselves, or later throttling themselves, didn't come along until much later. But if we'd stopped with passive heatsink cooling, we'd be using far slower systems (though probably a lot quieter!)
You're not wrong, but "we've been winging it for decades" is not necessarily a good defense here.
That said, I do think they did look at their performance numbers and made a conscious choice to lean into feeding these more power and running them hotter, though. Whether the impact would be lower with more conservative power specs is debatable, but as you say there are other reasons why trying to fake generational leaps by making CPUs capable of fusing helium is not a great idea.