Intel’s 14th and 15th generation of CPUs have been suffering ongoing stability problems that have prompted gaming server providers to switch to AMD chips.
Users of certain Intel 13th and14th Generationprocessors have been suffering throughongoing stability problemsfor some time. Errors have manifested as blue screens, gaming performance issues, and total system crashes, causing widespread frustration.
YouTubersLevel1Techsstarted an investigation into the problem to gather solid data on what was really going on. They collected and analyzed telemetry data, discovering the process that Intel was far more likely to appear in error logs than AMD.
The differences thrown up by the data were stark. Over 90 days, 1,431 decompression errors were linked to Intel CPUs from the 13th or 14th Gen. By contrast, AMD CPUs only suffered four instances of the same error type.
This problem does not appear to be restricted to consumer-grade CPUs. Data centers have also been reported to have high crash rates.
Level1Techs spoke to data center providers who said that costs went up due to the need to replace failing CPUs and engage Intel’s technical support teams. One provider who dealt with servers for multiplayer games quoted a potential loss of over $100,000, since players assumed the problem was with the game, not the server hardware.
Intel has claimedthat these instability problems were due to motherboard manufacturers trying to push too much performance out of the CPUs and ignoring recommended safeguards in the process.
Information collected during the Level1Techs investigation disputes this, however, as data center providers were reporting issues even when using motherboards specifically designed for stability.
Those same data center providers confirmed that they were now encouraging customers to selectAMD Ryzen 9 7950X systems, which offer a higher level of stability.
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Intel is yet to confirm the root cause of the instability problems.
Rebecca Hills-Duty was a Tech Writer on Dexerto’s UK Team, specializing in PC components, VR, AMD, Nvidia and Intel. She has previously written for UploadVR and The Escapist, hosts a weekly show on RadioSEGA and has an obsession with retro gaming.
