Because hey we already got your money and doing the right thing doesn't line my already full pockets.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
21 points (95.7% liked)
Technology
35148 readers
62 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Yes, but then who will dare to buy from them in future?
Frankly? Most people.
Most people are really dumb about this type of thing.
Most people will never hear of this.
I agree that most people won't care but take issue with calling them "dumb". Everyone has a limited amount of time on this planet to build skills and chase hobbies. A lot of people on this site have tech-related jobs and hobbies, so of course this matters to us. I might expect someone who buys pre-built gaming PCs to keep this on their radar, but the vast majority of folks who use computers as email and social media machines, including those who only use it for data entry type jobs, have little reason to care about the specifics of their CPU or any other single component of their computer. If their computer breaks, that's annoying, but that's life. They'll spend the same amount on a new laptop as we might spend on a new CPU and get on with their day.
I don't know what brand of spark plugs are in my car, and maybe a mechanic or car enthusiast would find that dumb. But hey, I'm too busy caring about my CPU to spend time worrying about my car unless it breaks.
Anyone who ritualistically buys Dell. I believe Intel is on the record as having called Dell "the best friend money can buy."
So that's the thing, realistically. If this affected just consumer chips that you can buy off the shelf, sure. A bit of market lost, but the OEMs and the data center clients are still there.
But this time it's all different. Intel fucked everyone's stuff up, and said they're not doing anything about it.
That will certainly not go unnoticed.
You don't really have much of a choice in the high end laptop world. Maybe this will be enough to push manufacturers to put AMD CPUs into high end workstations. I'd kill for a Thinkpad P1 with AMD.
I stopped in 2007 and haven't looked back, and advise friends and family to do the same. This is just more ammo for the "but why" rebuttal speech, and baby, "wanting your cpu to not die" is an awfully juicy bullet.
Watching Intel fuck themselves the last decade has been an absolute delight, but this, I could almost fap to this news.
If the product has issues it should be legally required to either have a warranty extension, recall, or both. Heck they shouldn't be selling more units until it's figured out and patched.
It's absurd to say: "it might have problems but we'll keep selling it as is".
We have safety recalls. There should be product degregation recalls.
Looks like a class action lawsuit, smells like a class action lawsuit
It is Intel so I'm sure they have already done the cost-benefit analysis of a recall vs losing a class-action lawsuit
Class action lawsuit, but demand entire company to be put under disqualification from operating for some time instead of just wanting money that will amount to you getting like 10€.
Quick question. How many U's are appropriate in the phrase Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck Intel?
12 is traditional. And 7 F's.
If you’re in the EU this would probably fall under the 2 year guarantee required by law.
Can’t wait for Steve’s next video. Oh boy.
Neat, guess I'm going AMD for my next build.
You and everybody else.
Me who chose the AMD Ryzen version of a laptop last year instead of Intel Raptor Lake because it was $10 cheaper:
Moore's Law is Dead shared an interesting video yesterday about these chips. Supposedly, leaks from his sources at Intel say that high voltages being pushed through the ring bus cause degradation. The leaks claim it shares the same power rail as the P and E cores, meaning it's influenced by the voltage requested by the cores.
For context, the ring bus is responsible for communication between cores, peripherals, and the platform. This includes memory accesses, which means that if the ring bus fails and does something incorrectly, it could appear normal but result in errors far down the line.
Going beyond the video specifically, and considering what others have suggested as workarounds, it seems like ring bus degradation might be a decent candidate for the actual root cause of these issues.
Some observations around chips degrading were:
- High memory pressure exacerbates the issue.
- Chips with more cores deteriorate faster.
Some of the suggestions to work around the issue were:
- Lower the memory speed.
- Lower the voltage and clock speeds.
- Disabling E cores.
All of those can be related to stress being put on the ring bus:
- Higher voltage being put through the bus -> higher likelihood of physical damage
- More memory pressure -> more usage of the bus, more opportunity for damage to accumulate
- More cores -> more memory pressure
- Slower memory speeds -> less maximum throughput -> less stress
I'm not claiming anything definitive, but I think my money is on this one.
Another reason added to the CVS-receipt-long list of reasons to never buy Intel.
Thanks, ~~Steve~~ Intel.
HANG ON BEFORE YOU HIT THE DOWNVOTE BUTTON!
They don't need a recall. If your processor ain't broke yet then the patch will (supposedly) prevent it from breaking and if it's ALREADY broke then Intel will (supposedly) replace it via RMA.
So what's the big fuggin' problem here? That Intel won't use the term "recall"?
The "problem" is that the more you understand the engineering, the less you believe Intel when they say they can fix it in microcode. Without writing an entire essay, the TL/DR is that the instability gets worse over time, and the only way that happens is if applied voltages are breaking down dielectric barriers within the chip. This damage is irreparable, 100% of chips in the wild are irreparably damaging themselves over time.
Even if Intel can slow the bleeding with microcode, they can't repair the damage, and every chip that has ever ran under the bad code will have a measurably shorter lifespan. For the average gamer, that sometimes hasn't even been the average warranty period.
+1. Lots of people are also likely to not have any idea about the situation and just think their PC crashes or acts up more. More of these issues can pop up over time.
A recall forces them to notify customers of the issue so the customer can act on it.
They can most likely prevent further breakdown through software. If the meters and controls are functioning correctly, they can undervolt the CPU. But it's not really a fix if that comes with a performance penalty. If it's a bug where the CPU maxes out the voltage when idle so it can do nothing faster, that could be fixed with no performance penalty, but that seems unlikely.
I'm sorry but this is just a fundamentally incorrect take on the physics at play here.
You unfortunately can't ever prevent further breakdown. Every time you run any voltage through any CPU, you are always slowly breaking down gate-oxides. This is a normal, non-thermal failure mode of consumer CPUs. The issue is that this breakdown is non-linear. As the breakdown process increases, it increases resistance inside the die, and as a consequence requires higher minimum voltages to remain stable. That higher voltage accelerates the rate of idle damage, making time disproportionately more damaging the more damaged a chip is.
If you want to read more on these failure modes, I'd recommend the following papers:
L. Shi et al., "Effects of Oxide Electric Field Stress on the Gate Oxide Reliability of Commercial SiC Power MOSFETs," 2022 IEEE 9th Workshop on Wide Bandgap Power Devices & Applications
Y. Qian et al., "Modeling of Hot Carrier Injection on Gate-Induced Drain Leakage in PDSOI nMOSFET," 2021 IEEE International Conference on Integrated Circuits, Technologies and Applications