I’m curious about the timeframe for failures though. Like, if these machines are being used for feature film VFX, I wouldn’t be surprised if the CPU is running at near 100%, 24/7 for months on end. If it fails after 6 months under those conditions, a typical home user might be able to go years without an issue. Of course, there would probably be unlucky people who have problems long before that.
It’s also interesting that we’re not hearing anything from Amazon, Google or Microsoft. They use Intel-based servers and they also push them hard. Are they not seeing these problems, or are they just not talking about them? If they’re not seeing them, is it safe to push the affected Intel CPUs hard as long as you avoid very specific code / algorithms?
The news is about Core i9 CPUs, which are the enthusiast / possibly workstation offering by Intel with high single core clock speeds. Amazon, Google and Microsoft use server CPUs which usually don’t feature such high speeds, but rather focus on more cores and more possible RAM.
However, if a vendor sells a product with the main feature of high clock speeds and the product fails when I’m using that exact feature for prolonged periods of time, I’d say it’s faulty.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft probably do mostly use server CPUs, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t a few special projects that used specialized desktop CPUs. And, at their scale “a few special projects” probably means a few hundred machines.
I’m curious about the timeframe for failures though. Like, if these machines are being used for feature film VFX, I wouldn’t be surprised if the CPU is running at near 100%, 24/7 for months on end. If it fails after 6 months under those conditions, a typical home user might be able to go years without an issue. Of course, there would probably be unlucky people who have problems long before that.
It’s also interesting that we’re not hearing anything from Amazon, Google or Microsoft. They use Intel-based servers and they also push them hard. Are they not seeing these problems, or are they just not talking about them? If they’re not seeing them, is it safe to push the affected Intel CPUs hard as long as you avoid very specific code / algorithms?
The news is about Core i9 CPUs, which are the enthusiast / possibly workstation offering by Intel with high single core clock speeds. Amazon, Google and Microsoft use server CPUs which usually don’t feature such high speeds, but rather focus on more cores and more possible RAM.
However, if a vendor sells a product with the main feature of high clock speeds and the product fails when I’m using that exact feature for prolonged periods of time, I’d say it’s faulty.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft probably do mostly use server CPUs, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t a few special projects that used specialized desktop CPUs. And, at their scale “a few special projects” probably means a few hundred machines.
But yeah, clearly these CPUs are faulty.