Intel’s troubles with instability on 13th-gen and 14th-gen CPUs continues to escalate, and a new report suggests that gamers are returning these CPUs at a much higher rate than retailers expect. An anonymous European retailer says they’ve seen four times as many returns for 13th-gen and 14th-gen CPUs compared to 12th-gen, according to a report from French outlet Les Numeriques.
Returns have only ramped up recently, however. The retailer says that in the six months following the release of all three generations, the return rates are nearly identical. Looking at the rate now, however, 13th-gen CPUs are being returned four times as often as 12th-gen, while 14th-gen CPUs are being return three times as much. Given what we’ve learned about Intel’s instability issue, this suggests that the processors do, indeed, degrade over time.
The outlet speculates the return rate is somewhere around 5%, while most CPUs only get up to around a 1% return rate. Even that is a low estimate, as the outlet points out, considering there’s some percentage of processors that receive service directly from Intel. According to a report from Level1Techs, the number of affected processors could be as low as 10% and as a high as 50%.
In addition, some number of these processors are damaged beyond repair, according to the retailer. Intel has pinned the blame of its instability problem on elevated voltage requests within the microcode of the processor. However, we’ve since learned that a manufacturing error is also causing issues, and leaked internal communications suggest there could be even more factors at play.
Intel has committed to release a microcode update in mid-August that will address the elevated voltages, but it might not fix every processor. According to the retailer, the processors that are permanently damaged won’t be fixed by the microcode update. It’s possible that some processors impacted by Intel’s manufacturing error are still in circulation as well, which also wouldn’t be fixed by the microcode update.
Although Intel has finally broken its silence in addressing the instability problem facing its CPUs — which has grown over the course of several months — we still don’t have a concrete answer if the microcode update will fix the widespread issue.
