I’m worried it’s a lithography issue. The recent GamersNexus and Level1Techs coverage seems to point that way, at least to me. For example, they mention CPUs working fine for a while, then suddenly becoming increasingly unstable. There’s so much that can go wrong with lithography that could cause that kind of behavior, and we know they’ve been having issues given the whole 14nm debacle.
It doesn’t sound like the issue extends beyond a small number of part SKUs. It’s probably more of a design flaw based on the data from Steve and Wendell. I’m waiting to see if Intel tries to gaslight everyone or actually does something honorable to resolve the issue.
It sounds like 12th Gen parts are fine and nobody is talking about other SKUs beyond the top end enthusiast parts. If someone finds a way to make a program to test for the issue that could be exciting to see how broad the problem is.
When you say a lithography issue are you concerned that everything coming from that fab line is affected? Or did you just mean the physical design has a flaw that can’t be fixed in microcode / BIOS?
