Intel has resolved its persistent desktop CPU instability problems

In late 2022, reports of instability problems with the 13th-gen Intel desktop CPUs began to surface shortly after their release. These issues continued, with users experiencing sudden crashes on PCs with the 14th-gen CPUs as well. Intel has now identified the cause of these crashes and failures and has committed to releasing a fix by next month.

In its announcement, Intel said that based on an extensive analysis of the processors returned to the company, it has determined that the increased operating voltage caused instability problems. Apparently, it’s because the microcode algorithm – microcodes or machine codes are hardware-level instruction sets – has been sending incorrect voltage requests to the processor.

Intel has now promised to release a microcode patch to fix “the root cause of exposure to high voltages”. The patch is still being validated to ensure it can handle all “instability scenarios reported to Intel,” but the company aims to release it by mid-August.

As wccftech points out, while Intel’s processors have been causing problems for users for at least a year and a half, Sebastian Castellanos’ X release in February brought the issue into the spotlight. Castellanos wrote that Unreal Engine 4 and 5 games, such as Fortnite and Hogwarts Legacy, had a “worrying trend” on 13th and 14th generation Intel processors. He also noted that the problem seems to mostly affect more expensive models and joined the discussion on the Steam Community. A user posting on Steam wanted to warn those experiencing “running out of video memory while allocating render resource” errors that their CPU was at fault. They also linked several Reddit threads with people who had the same problem and had determined that their problem was related to their Intel CPUs.

Recently, indie studio Alderon Games posted about “significant issues with Intel’s CPU stability” while developing its multiplayer dinosaur survival game Path of Titans. Its founder, Matthew Cassells, said the studio found the problem affected end customers, dedicated game servers, developer PCs, game server providers and even benchmarking tools that use Intel’s 13th and 14th generation processors. Cassells added that even processors that perform well initially degrade and eventually fail, based on the company’s findings. “In our own testing, the failure rate we’ve seen is close to 100 percent,” the studio’s message says, “indicating that it’s only a matter of time before these processors fail.”