Intel has a Pretty Big Problem..

[Grim5]

I do wonder how many PCs are actually not stable.

Your PC is as stable as the last piece of software you successfully ran. That's unfortunately the truth; no pc is 100% stable, you can't guarantee it

 

[Rogueywon]

I'm still thinking it looks like the silicon degradation issue is out in force on Borderlands 4. The error message that 13th/14th gen users are seeing is (emphasis added):

LowLevelFatalError [File:.\Runtime/RenderCore/Private/ShaderCodeArchive.cpp] [Line: 448]
DecompressShaderWithOodleAndExtraLogging(): Could not decompress shader group with Oodle. Group Index: 2445 Group IoStoreHash:84b3cc9e0a5de84bf1590509 Group NumShaders: 8 Shader Index: 48348 Shader In-group Index: 2445 Shader Hash: AE417C14F27EDCB5F703C48ACE93FF93A5E3751A. The CPU (Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-14700K) may be unstable.

 

[Rroff]

I'm still thinking it looks like the silicon degradation issue is out in force on Borderlands 4. The error message that 13th/14th gen users are seeing is (emphasis added):

I'm not ruling it out but every time someone comes up with "signs" of mass 13th/14th gen failures so far when the dust settles it is either a tiny number of affected systems or something else, so with a backdrop of issues with the game I'm wary as to the root cause.

Interestingly there seems to be common failure combinations which appear more regular in the game, some of it may reflect volume of systems:

-14700K shader compilation.
-13900K and 9950X start up, shader compilation and random crashes.
-9800X3D random crashes (often with ASRock motherboards - possibly people still on older BIOS).

 

[Rogueywon]

I'm not ruling it out but every time someone comes up with "signs" of mass 13th/14th gen failures so far when the dust settles it is either a tiny number of affected systems or something else, so with a backdrop of issues with the game I'm wary as to the root cause.

Interestingly there seems to be common failure combinations which appear more regular in the game, some of it may reflect volume of systems:

-14700K shader compilation.
-13900K and 9950X start up, shader compilation and random crashes.
-9800X3D random crashes (often with ASRock motherboards - possibly people still on older BIOS).

Aye, possibly. It's interesting that this one seems to be tripping up the 13700K and 14700K, when it's more commonly the **900s we see going down to the degradation.

 

[humbug]

I'm not ruling it out but every time someone comes up with "signs" of mass 13th/14th gen failures so far when the dust settles it is either a tiny number of affected systems or something else, so with a backdrop of issues with the game I'm wary as to the root cause.

Interestingly there seems to be common failure combinations which appear more regular in the game, some of it may reflect volume of systems:

-14700K shader compilation.
-13900K and 9950X start up, shader compilation and random crashes.
-9800X3D random crashes (often with ASRock motherboards - possibly people still on older BIOS).

-9800X3D random crashes (often with ASRock motherboards - possibly people still on older BIOS).

Well i just Pikachu faced..... not. Stay away from ASRock motherboard's people...

 

[humbug]

Well i just Pikachu faced..... not. Stay away from ASRock motherboard's people...

For context ASRock have the same problem Asus had with cooking the SoC on the 7800X3D, ASRock are doing it with the 9800X3D, dead chips have burn marks on the SoC voltage pads, 86% of 9800X3D's failure rates are on ASRock boards, compared to 4% and 1% on MSI and Gigabyte boards.

I'm sure this isn't related, right?

 

[sastusbulbas]

For context ASRock have the same problem Asus had with cooking the SoC on the 7800X3D, ASRock are doing it with the 9800X3D, dead chips have burn marks on the SoC voltage pads, 86% of 9800X3D's failure rates are on ASRock boards, compared to 4% and 1% on MSI and Gigabyte boards.

I'm sure this isn't related, right?

A big part of that was sheer volume of sales.

Asrock sold over 2 million AM5 motherboards, and the 9800X3D is one of the most popular, yes t despite this, and the issue affecting all 9000 series X3D, apparently just over 100 failed X3D CPUs

The majority on a bios that was advised to change, and some where inexperienced were playing with bios settings.

Add to that users blaming later bios updates after an early bios did the damage.

It puts a damper on owning an Asrock board, but many other motherboard brands have their own issues.

Hopefully one day we won't have children designing consumer products.

 

[KompuKare]

I'm still thinking it looks like the silicon degradation issue is out in force on Borderlands 4. The error message that 13th/14th gen users are seeing is (emphasis added):

Whoever decided to actually check the CRC when decompressing assests is defintely off Intel's Xmas list!

Does sort of remind me of ECC as in most of assume memory errors do not exits, but those running server grade hardware and collecting kernel stats know otherwise. The rest of us silently corrupt data!

Probably not a ton of margin on Intel's graphics cards but they are profitable if you do some back of the envelope maths.

5nm 300nm wafer probably costs around 20k, each die is 272mm so at best you'll get 220 good dies but assuming some defects you may end up with about 172 serviceable B580 chips. $20,000/172 is around $100 each, add packing, memory, cooler, PCB and distribution costs there's not a ton of margin in it for Intel. They can still rescue some of the broken dies for B570's and $20k is on the high side.

Intel's biggest problem in GPU's is actually manufacturing, they sell everything they produce and AIB's are crying out for more stock but given Intel is such a small player on the GPU front lead times for extra wafers and capacity at AIB factories is something like 6 months (taken from a recent Gamers Nexus video on the matter).

Still the worst GPU margins of the three by far. And AMD barely bother with GPUs ATM as they consider them to be poor margin per wafer - a trule flawed strategy on AMD's part IMO if we consider fixed costs. Speaking of fixed costs...

Intel's fixed costs of bringing Battlemage and Alchemist to market must be huge. And this is Intel who's attention span for anything not x86 CPUs is notoriously short - the only difference with GPUs is that CPUs without a GPU are pretty unsellable so they need to continue with iGPU. And somehow, the pressure of a dGPU is actually good for their drivers - as their previous approach of "it is stable in Windows and 5 games - no need for any more updates" is not viable in 2025+