CS-343, CS@Worcester
This November 17th recap in the tech world details Intel’s major crisis this year. It affected the company’s reputation and its consumers. Let me explain further Intel 13th and 14th gen consumer CPUs were degrading rapidly. Even though this issue was not really known for a while since November 2022. First let us break down their response to the issue. Then we will go further on what Intel did to fix this issue.
To clarify Intel’s 13th and 14 gen CPUs were degrading as a result of microcoding issues. At that time, many odms and motherboard manufacturers provided custom bios options. These options would send a lot of volts to the CPUs. The issue is that due to Intel’s microcode issues it can not handle these high volts from the motherboards. That certain CPUs cores would get too much electricity that it would cause those cores to degrade. As a result, this caused the CPUs to become more unstable and lose performance over time.
Under those circumstances Intel had to respond to these issues horribly. Intel did not want to be blamed for this issue because obviously this would affect the company’s sales and reputation. So they would push the blame onto other companies like motherboard manufacturers. Once the motherboard companies tried to help users with these issues were still happening. Many customers would try to move their responsibilities multiple times that angered consumers and motherboard companies. As a result, consumers went to Intel for their CPU issues. Eventually, Intel ran out of new CPUs for all these repairs. To be honest, Intel did a lot more underhanded ways to get out of their responsibility in this issue.
Lastly Intel’s solution to their 13th and 14th gen issue. To solve this issue, Intel would send out a microcode update. They did this after multiple bios updates to fix users’ instability issues. Intel set microcode for specific bios, which they called ultra, for their 15th gen CPUs. This was intended for motherboard manufacturers to use. They did this so that motherboard manufacturers do not make the CPUs take high volts to compete with each other. On the other hand, ODMs can slightly exceed these restrictions. This is because they are selling Intel CPUs in their laptops or desktops. There are 2 amazing content creators who explore this topic in more depth. Their names are Jayz2cents and Gamers Nexus. They explain everything from the timeline of all these events. They also describe the reasons why Intel took the actions they did in all these events.
Sources used for this blog
Jayz2cents, Intel’s weapon against motherboard companies… will it work?, published on October 15, 2024, Youtube, accessed on November 17th, 2024
Gamers Nexus, Scumbag Intel: Shady Practices, Terrible Responses,& Failure to Act, published on August 12th, 2024, Youtube, accessed on November 17th, 2024
From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by Ben Santos and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.