Earlier this year in February, users running systems powered by Intel processors began reporting out-of-memory (OOM) crashes with messages that read "out of video memory trying to allocate a rendering resource," though the discrete video cards on such affected systems had plenty of VRAM to spare.
With time though, it became clearer that the issue was being caused by Intel processors as they were the common denominator, and also AMD Ryzen PCs did not have such problems.
The issue escalated with time and in April, more and more users began experiencing problems like frequent game crashes prompting companies like Epic Games to post a workaround that involved going into the BIOS and tweaking serial voltage-identifier (SVID) behaviour settings.
In the meantime there has been a lot of negative press about these incidents, and rightfully so, as Intel was quite quiet about the issue. The company has apologized for that today explaining that it has been a challenging issue to get to the root, which was a consequence of "elevated operating voltage."
That's not even the best thing it said today as the tech giant has also announced an additional two years of extended warranty, though it is only for boxed 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors. Thus such chips will now have a total of five years of warranty.
Intel writes:
Intel is committed to making sure all customers who have or are currently experiencing instability symptoms on their 13th and/or 14th Gen desktop processors are supported in the exchange process. We stand behind our products, and in the coming days we will be sharing more details on two-year extended warranty support for our boxed Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors.
In the meantime, if you are currently or previously experienced instability symptoms on your Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop system:
- For users who purchased systems from OEM/System Integrators – please reach out to your system manufacturer’s support team for further assistance.
- For users who purchased a boxed CPU – please reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance.
At the same time, we apologize for the delay in communications as this has been a challenging issue to unravel and definitively root cause.
It is no secret that AMD is winning the efficiency race against Intel as we found in our 14900K/14600K review for CPUs. Although it is a sort of similar situation in the GPU space as well, with Nvidia GeForce leading Radeon, the good thing about the AMD cards is that they are not prone to overheating with temperatures being similar to their Nvidia counterparts as we noted in our recent 7800 XT 2024 review.
Update August 2: Intel has also added a new statement related to Via Oxidation which some of the media have speculated as the potential cause behind such instabilites. Intel states such speculations are a bit misguided although it admits there were related issues early on in the pipeline but those had been mitigated.
Here's the company's full statement:
The Via Oxidation issue currently reported in the press is a minor one that was addressed with manufacturing improvements and screens in early 2023.
The issue was identified in late 2022, and with the manufacturing improvements and additional screens implemented Intel was able to confirm full removal of impacted processors in our supply chain by early 2024. However, on-shelf inventory may have persisted into early 2024 as a result.
Minor manufacturing issues are an inescapable fact with all silicon products. Intel continuously works with customers to troubleshoot and remediate product failure reports and provides public communications on product issues when the customer risk exceeds Intel quality control thresholds.
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