but to underplay the degradation issue is just not right.
As I mentioned thing is - AMD, and it isn't even proved it is an AMD issue, have an issue and despite being a fairly low number of CPUs affected so far it is well covered by user reports, Intel supposedly have a "massive" issue but there is tumbleweed between user reports - something doesn't stack up and it isn't explained by the difference in sales volume - there are like 10x the number of user reports of the AMD failure in a relatively short space of time compared to 2-3 years of Intel sales.
Look at retailers who publish returns information either on the product pages or have released data to the tech press (such as Mindfactory, Puget, Alza, etc.) and across the range rates are low. On the Amazon listings they are mostly highly rated with fairly low numbers of negative reviews and only a small subset of those are complaining about issues related to degradation and those are mostly the 14900 SKUs. This is not indicative of major issues, at least not so far.
Intel put the replacement program into place due to pressure from the media and consumers after the news broke - and a lot of those chips probably aren't faulty - the vast majority of people I know who've returned their 13th or 14th gen CPUs have either done so out of an abundance of caution either to swap to AMD or under the impression that a newer chip would be a fixed one.
EDIT: Even on these forums reports of failures is low and there are a fair few owners of such chips here, I can only recall like 3 reports off the top of my head with i9 chips - for something which is supposedly such a massive issue it is not having much presence.
Used market here shows plenty of faulty 13th gen for sale.
Have to say outside of the 13900 SKUs that isn't something I've seen so far, there seems to be a few 13900s which have one of or both the earlier issues of via oxidisation or an older voltage bug and/or possibly the vmin shift issue - the vmin shift issue actually affects most 13th and 14th gen CPUs but only a small subset it causes out of range behaviour that will damage the chip.
I can perfectly understand people not being willing to take a gamble on the 13th and 14th gen but there is very little which actually backs up the reports, mostly from Level1Techs, of massive failure rates. That isn't to say the problems aren't real but so far it seems you have to be pretty unlucky to encounter them on most of the models and little bit higher chance on the i9 chips (which personally I would avoid).
