Behind-the-Scenes: Intel Report (Patreon)

Hey everyone - (and probably Intel PR!)

We have been working on a report diving into more of the Intel failures. The story has been covered to death on the technicals and possible causes, so what we are working on currently has more to do with Intel Corporation's actions historically to these types of situations. I thought I'd give a preview for Patreon supporters.

Currently, we are going through as much of Intel's history as the team can remember to try and better understand if it has any form of 'playbook' or trusted course of action it takes for its colossal failures. Knowing this and plotting trends would be helpful for trying to better understand where it might go next with its current instability and oxidation issues.

Some examples include Intel's Atom issues, its old 1990s-era FDIV bug (that, IIRC, resulted in a recall), and its handling of the old "toothpaste" controversies during its era of CPUs with bad TIM.

We are looking at dozens of articles, reports, statements, reviews, and material about each of these and trying to map Intel's responses. It's remarkable how well some of them match today's trickle-feed of official information.

Regarding the current issue, I am still talking to FA labs. That Intel has confirmed oxidation issues at the vias on some chips (13th Gen, at least) certainly makes the job easier but, to quote a commenter, "it's like finding a needle in a billion haystacks." Maybe knowing this is a confirmed issue reduces that to "finding a needle in 900 million haystacks" instead. It'd be great educational material, so we're still pursuing that.

In the interim, we are monitoring the microcode situation closely. I've had a few extreme overclockers contact me with information about the new microcode, but we're not at a stage where we can publish yet. Requires vetting.

The bigger question that we've been kicking around internally remains the impending Zen 5 CPU launches: With Intel's microcode almost certainly dropping after these reviews, we currently will take the following approach -

• We can't recommend any 13th or 14th Gen CPUs until Intel gives confidence to buyers, including with this microcode update

• We also can't test what isn't available, so for the review, we'll test with the current revisions of everything (as of last week), but maintain our stance of "we are not recommending Intel 13th & 14th Gen at this time"

• The data will still be on the charts

Intel has otherwise been impressively useless at making concrete commitments for its customers. It's like an ASUS situation, except with about 100,000 more layers of middle management and PR-by-committee, so at times, it is at least a little less tonedeaf than the ASUS situation.

A little.

We'll keep you all posted. In the least, it's been super educational to work on this content alongside some experts in the industry. I've enjoyed having a project to work with Wendell on. I'm also hoping to get with Gordon for a video sometime in the next month or two, but we'll see on timing.

-Steve