Technology Intel CPUs are crashing again during summer heatwaves, Firefox dev warns — Mozilla staff's tracking overwhelmed

[jamey910111]

Content source

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/firefox-dev-says-intel-raptor-lake-crashes-are-increasing-with-rising-temperatures-in-record-european-heat-wave-mozilla-staffs-tracking-overwhelmed-by-intel-crash-reports-team-disables-the-function

"Mozilla has reportedly been swamped with crash reports for its Firefox browser, the majority of which are coming from Raptor Lake Intel CPUs that are known to suffer from instability that is further exacerbated by heat. Senior Staff Engineer Gabriele Svelto said on Mastodon that a mass of browser crash reports are coming from Intel Raptor Lake-powered systems located in areas that are suffering from heat waves."

"The instability issue exploded around the second and third quarters of last year, and it took several months for the company to find its root cause. Since this was a physical degradation problem, no amount of patches can reverse the instability — Intel’s microcode updates only mitigated it and prevent the conditions that triggered the instability from occurring. Just last month, Intel released microcode update 0x12F to address the Vmin shift that’s happening to Raptor Lake CPUs that have been running for several days in a row. However, Svelto says that this version also caused the bugs to “come back in full force”."

And from: These Intel CPUs are crashing across Europe due to the weather

TL;DR: Intel's 13th and 14th-gen processors face ongoing instability and crash issues due to high-frequency voltage fluctuations and silicon quality problems, worsened by rising temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. Despite patches, many users still report failures, highlighting persistent challenges with Raptor Lake CPU reliability.

Some discussion about this issue was also previously posted about this topic in this thread: Battle - Which Intel Processor should I get: 13th Gen 10-Core, Core i7-13620H, or Gen 7 Core Ultra 5, 125U for my next laptop?

 

[cofer123]

I read that claim a couple of weeks ago. Sounds like a Firefox issue to me (not surprising).

His correlation is unsubstantiated unless he can provide evidence of Raptor Lake processors crashing on anything other than Firefox under the same conditions and that heat is the cause. Otherwise, this is just an association fallacy.

A browser is not demanding enough to stress those high-end CPUs to the point heat can cause issues. Unless he also wants to admit Firefox has been lagging behind optimizations for a while, but I doubt he would accept this correlation.

 

[blackice]

I read that claim a couple of weeks ago. Sounds like a Firefox issue to me (not surprising).

His correlation is unsubstantiated unless he can provide evidence of Raptor Lake processors crashing on anything other than Firefox under the same conditions and that heat is the cause. Otherwise, this is just an association fallacy.

A browser is not demanding enough to stress those high-end CPUs to the point heat can cause issues. Unless he also wants to admit Firefox has been lagging behind optimizations for a while, but I doubt he would accept this correlation.

The Raptor Lake issues are not due to demanding tasks. It has to do with degradation of the silicon due to incorrect voltages being applied to the processor. Firefox just happens to hit a load situation that stumbles on the instabilities created by Intel’s own mistakes. You are right a processor should not crash due to a browser load. The Raptor Lake issues are a known problem and have yet to be fully rectified by Intel. It’s the reason I didn’t buy an Intel for my latest build last summer.

 

[jamey910111]

I guess i'd just stay from it as issues haven't been fixed/won't ever be fixed..until the next gen is widely available. I mean maybe to some extent Intel says they are fixed but you can't generally trust organizations to self-police, generally but in this case specially.