Last week, Intel put out an advisory note stating that it found the cause of crashing issues hitting its 13th and 14th-generation chips since February. A fix is arriving by mid-August via a microcode update, the company says.
That sounds like a happy end for customers frustrated by crashes for half a year, but it may not be as simple as that.
The Verge sought confirmation from Intel about how it intended to support affected customers going forward, with the responses printed verbatim on-site.
The site notes that while Intel didn’t confirm that degradation was permanent, the spokesperson “did not deny that when we asked.” Despite this, no recall is planned and the company hasn’t halted sales.
When asked whether the fix will help chips that are affected but not showing symptoms or whether such CPUs are “living on borrowed time”, the spokesperson highlighted the company’s confidence that it will be an “effective preventative solution” but avoided the question about invisible degradation.
Crucially, two questions were unanswered at the time of writing — though the site was promised that responses would come soon, so it’s possible that policy has yet to be settled upon. The first relates to whether warranty would be extended on the 13th and 14th-generation parts, and the second is how lenient Intel will be any RMA requests, given the hard-to-pin-down nature of the problem.
While the above statement suggested that the patch could “provide some instability improvements”, we’d recommend approaching Intel support for a replacement if you’ve witnessed instability. As for the possibility of background degradation without symptoms, it seems that all you can do is hope.
