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Aardvark DailyThe world's longest-running online daily news and commentary publication, now in its 30th year. The opinion pieces presented here are not purported to be fact but reasonable effort is made to ensure accuracy.Content copyright © 1995 - 2025 to Bruce Simpson (aka Aardvark), the logo was kindly created for Aardvark Daily by the folks at aardvark.co.uk |
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Ever since the ubiqutous 8080 set the benchmark for 8-bit microprocessor chip design, Intel has been a leader in the CPU marketplace.
Despite fierce competition from Zilog's 8080-compatible Z80 processor, Intel led the charge into the 16-bit world with its 8086 and slightly crippled 8088 variant with an 8-bit bus.
For a long time it looked as if nobody could dethrone Intel's dominance of the marketplace. Motorola's 6800 and 68000 series tried hard, RCA's 1802, and even the mighty MOS 6502 used in millions of Apple and clone computers could not derail Intel's journey to dominance.
A number of wannabe companies gave it their all, including Cyrix -- but failed to match Intel's sales figures or performance.
Then came the AMD Ryzen series and things began to change.
Suddenly there was a very real competitor to Intel's top-lines of HPDT processors and the game was on.
AMD used new concepts such as low-nm fabrication technology, chiplets and 3D cache to boost the performance of its offerings and this caught Intel on the back foot.
With nowhere to go and no sub-10nm tech readily available to it, Intel opted instead to simply crank up the clock-speed of its processors in an attempt to brute-force its way to higher levels of performance -- and, for a while, this did the trick.
However, as Scotty was oft-heard to proclaim "ye canna beat the laws of physics Captain" and it's beginning to look as if this crude strategy has now backfired big-time on the latest 13000 and 14000 series high-end devices from Intel.
The internet is now awash with reports that these CPUs are failing at a horrendous rate.
Initially it was claimed that a rash of failures in computers primarily designed for gaming was down to poorly configured power curves and over-clocking that pushed the chips beyond their design limits. Since the 13000 and 14000 series of CPUs already run very hot, to the point of thermal throttling under heavy load, even with good cooling solutions, the added stress of overclocking or over-volting was allegedly causing irreversable silicon degradation within a few short months of use.
However, it's now becoming increasingly obvious that the operation of these chips beyond their designed parameters is not the real cause of the problem.
Now we're seeing processors that aren't being thrashed starting to fail in exactly the same way.
Allegedly, some large-scale non-gaming users have experienced failure rates as high as 50 percent within machines that use these CPUs.
Intel has been uncomfortably muted in their response to this data and that has a lot of people very worried.
If these CPUs are basically just bad by design, how will it affect Intel's stock price and the future of their products? Have they simply hit a brutal brick wall that can't be overcome without significant re-engineering at huge cost?
Certainly, anyone considering a HPDT computer system today would be well advised to steer clear of Intel's offerings and instead jump on the AMD bandwagon. This will save them energy costs and, if we are to believe what we're told, the huge potential for disruptive failures.
Right now I suspect there are a lot of late-night meetings taking place at Intel as they try to firstly come up with a suitable statement of position to be given to the media and then some kind of way to mitigate the damage without bankrupting the company.
Might we see all 13900 and 14900 CPU owners given a steep discount on the next generation of processors? Unfortunately, that alone is unlikely to be enough, given that we're about to also see a change of motherboard with Intel's next generation release so that discount would be nullified by the need to change more than just the CPU in order to bring an affected system back to life.
And then, of course, there's the looming threat from the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite family of processors that look set to further disrupt the market, in the way that Apple's M-series ARM-based processors have done.
Also, in this age of AI, could the power of a processor's NPU be more important than the power of its traditional von neumann architecture processor?
Is now a good time to sell Intel stock perhaps?
Carpe Diem folks!
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