After months of investigation, following mounting reports of problematic 13th and 14th Gen Core processors, we finally have an official statement from Intel. The good news is that the company claims to have discovered the root cause of instabilities on its Raptor Lake CPUs. The better news is that the fix should be simple for affected users.
It turns out that “elevated operating voltage” is to blame for making Team Blue’s best CPUs so unstable, “stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor.” This is according to a post made on Intel Community, by employee Thomas Hannaford.
Intel plans to publish a microcode patch in mid-August, following validation checks, which should resolve this issue once and for all. The company requests that affected users continue to reach out to customer support in the meantime. It also encourages those unsure whether their system is affected to watch the RobeyTech video we’ve embedded above.
Some 13th and 14th Gen processors have also suffered from manufacturing issues, Intel confirms. However, the company resolved this problem in 2023, and it is apparently unrelated to the widely reported instabilities affecting the chips. You can check out the full statement on the Intel subreddit, shared by employee Lex Hoyos.
While it’s a relief to know that Intel will soon repair what are temporarily defective processors, it’s unclear how quickly it can patch up relations with affected customers. Both builders and businesses alike have lost time and money, in some cases enduring $100k losses, because of this error. Combine this with the confusion surrounding the prior baseline profile “fix”, and it’s hard not to conclude that the company has an uphill battle ahead of it to restore wider confidence in the community.
These problems arguably couldn’t come at a worse time for Intel. They’ll undoubtedly make some wary of its upcoming Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors, at least in the short term. Worse still, the company’s microcode patch won’t arrive until after the launch of competing, presumably problem-free, AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors.
We’ll be sure to keep our eye on any further developments, after Intel publishes its fix.