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Intel The Courts

Intel Sued Over Raptor Lake Voltage Instability (theregister.com) 58

Intel faces a class-action lawsuit alleging its 13th and 14th generation desktop processors from 2022 and 2023 are defective, causing system instability and frequent crashes. The suit claims that Intel knew of the issue but continued marketing the processors anyway. The Register reports: The plaintiff, Mark Vanvalkenburgh of Orchard Park, New York, purchased an Intel Core i7-13700K from Best Buy in January 2023, according to the complaint [PDF]. "After purchasing the product, Plaintiff learned that the processor was defective, unstable, and crashing at high rates," the complaint claims. "The processor caused issues in his computer, including random screen blackouts and random computer restarts. These issues were not resolved even after he attempted to install a patch issued by Intel for its 13th Generation processors."

The potential class-action lawsuit cites various media reports and social media posts dating back to December 2022 that describe problems with Intel's 13th and 14th generation processors, known as Raptor Lake. These reports document unexplained failures and system instability, as well as a higher-than-expected rate of product returns. "By late 2022 or early 2023, Intel knew of the defect," the complaint says. "Intel's Products undergo pre-release and post-release testing. Through these tests, Intel became aware of the defect in the processors." And because Intel continued making marketing claims touting the speed and performance of its products, with no mention of any defect, the complaint alleges that Intel committed fraud by omission, breached implied warranty, and violated New York General Business Law.

Intel Sued Over Raptor Lake Voltage Instability

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  • by Press2ToContinue ( 2424598 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2024 @07:57PM (#64926619)
    No need to seek redress from the manufacturer through the normal routes when you can sue them for an ass-load of money!!!

    Money! Money, Money!

    Wait a minute, he sounds like a Republican!!
    • These "plaintiffs" are stooges for class action attorneys. They'll end up with a $2.00 coupon and the lawyers will walk away with millions of dollars from Intel. Was their time dealing with the the case and this law firm really worth the payoff?
      • by Xenx ( 2211586 )
        My understanding was that usually the originating plaintiffs tend to get a larger portion of the damages, and all the rest get the scraps.
    • by yuvcifjt ( 4161545 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2024 @10:33PM (#64926833)

      What makes you say this is about money?

      Perhaps some people want their rights and the law to be respected?

      Isnâ(TM)t the point of the law to be upheld?

      No doubt companies come down hard on any individual that violates their rights, such as theft; so donâ(TM)t consumers have even more right to come down hard on companies who violate our personal rights?

      In fact, shouldnâ(TM)t the law protect the weaker over the big corporate entity?

      This is especially true since we now know from tech reviewers that Intel knew about the faults, but hoped the problem would be buried after the release of the next gen. But as it went the other way, and more people became aware of the defects, Intel tried instead by blaming board manufacturers who didnâ(TM)t follow âoeIntel specsâ - even though there were none specified.

      I think âoeHardware Unboxedâ or âoeGamers Nexusâ addressed this in detailâ¦
      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]

    • AMD got sued over something as trivial as whether their 8-core CMT-based FX processors actually had 8 cores. And AMD lost!

      • Probably because they only really had 4 cores, it was more like beefed up hyperthreading.

      • by kriston ( 7886 )

        I still own one of them. I had always wondered why VirtualBox wouldn't let me assign 8 cores to a VM when the CPUID clearly states "Eight-Core Processor."

        It technically has eight cores but has only four math units that are shared among all cores.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Intel's response has been inadequate. No recall, no offer to replace affected CPUs that have not yet started to die. The damage is permanent and irreversible.

      In future used Intel 13th and 14th gen CPUs will be largely worthless because there is no way to know if they are broken before buying one, so it's a diminution of value. Same for compatible motherboards and systems containing those CPUs. Intel's extended warranty will do little to change that, doesn't cover all affected parts, and will require the ori

    • Indeed - why didn't he just return it to the store as defective and get his money back? I know the US isn't so big on consumer rights, but surely returning a faulty product is still possible? I'm not sold on the argument about doing it this way to make money, as one of the buyers, but maybe he he owns the law firm that's going to handle it!

    • Stockholders who are invested in Intel will absolutely sue them because the companies inability to properly Q/A
      their product will cause a decline in value for the Company once the problem becomes known.

      It multiplies if it is determined the Company knew of the flaw and chose to do nothing to fix it.

      Getting sued for selling obviously faulty products becomes motivation to create a better product.
      This is true of any industry.

  • Recently my 3 year old 11th gen NUC died, dead as a doorstopper, and so I replaced it with a 13th gen NUC. According to my benchmarks, the new machine is about 10% faster on my workloads than the old machine - disappointing evidence of the death of Moore's law.

    So far, I've not seen any instability - perhaps I'm already benefiting from mitigations integrated into the Linux kernel.

    • I think itâ(TM)s the higher performance variants of Raptor lake. Apparently Intel overvolted an internal bus to run at higher peak clock speeds to compete with amd.

      Turned out to be bad for reliability

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Yep. And they will at least have suspected that this was a risk. But anything to keep up the pretense that their stuff is superior. Reminds me of Boeing.

        Also, takes a while to break.

    • by Xenx ( 2211586 )
      Intel has reaffirmed that mobile processors are not affected by the issue, which should include the NUC. I've heard people say they've had affected CPUs, but with issues this broad it's hard to tell if it's just coincidence or not. Given that mobile CPUs are designed with different/lower power scenarios from desktop, I would tend to believe they're not affected. Even if that is not the case, if it has the relevant microcode updates it should likely be fine.
      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I, and many other people, suspect Intel is blatantly lying and it just takes a while longer for their mobile crap to break. Fortunately I have not been buying Intel for a long time now. But I get asked about their CPUs.

        • by Xenx ( 2211586 )
          While it's true Intel could be lying, there just isn't enough evidence to back it up as anything more than pure speculation. The reality is that while the architecture is likely similar enough to be susceptible to the same problem, their restricted power design likely prevents the same problem from occurring.
        • If the theory that Intel pushed the higher end desktop processors past their safe limits to compete with AMD is correct, then the mobile and lower end desktop units will be fine.

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Or maybe they did the same thing for mobile and lower end. And it just takes longer to break. This is driven by greed and arrogance, no reason to believe they did this only with a limited scope.

    • According to my benchmarks, the new machine is about 10% faster on my workloads than the old machine - disappointing evidence of the death of Moore's law.

      Actually More's Law has been chugging away just fine...
      https://ourworldindata.org/dat... [ourworldindata.org]

    • n times more transistors doesn't mean n times more performance.

    • According to my benchmarks, the new machine is about 10% faster on my workloads than the old machine - disappointing evidence of the death of Moore's law.

      To the point that I saw your comment and thought, "Wow, 10% faster, that's pretty good!"

    • Why didn't you go AMD since that NUC failed in such a short time?

  • JayzTwoCents (Score:3, Informative)

    by michaelmalak ( 91262 ) <michael@michaelmalak.com> on Wednesday November 06, 2024 @08:32PM (#64926699) Homepage
    JayzTwoCents says Intel made the mistake of blindly trusting motherboard manufacturers to control voltage to the processor to balance performance against heat generated and power consumed. It simply created a race between motherboard manufacturers to peg the voltage to "maximize" the performance (that's like running your car at 7krpm continuously for years to maximize performance). Intel has now chosen to take a stronger role in motherboard design in the next generation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r4guqlrZSo [youtube.com].
  • I get it... modern overclocking is motorcycle dyno for nerds. It's fun and it's a vibrant community. Awesome. Dick sizing comes in many forms, and I salute you for it. Personally, I've never overclocked mine, and haven't had an issue - not even once. And when the bios fix came out I installed it right away. But I wouldn't blame Porsche for building a car that permitted me to red line the engine until it failed.

    Now if my 13900k suffers a failure, I'll expect them to honour the three year warranty. But that'

    • Re:I'm torn. (Score:4, Informative)

      by sjames ( 1099 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2024 @11:30PM (#64926897) Homepage Journal

      The failures happened without overclocking as well because a microcode bug caused the CPU to request too much voltage from the mainboard. Can't blame the mainboard makers either. The CPU got what it requested and it was too much.

    • Turns out, it's pretty nefarious:

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]

      Congrats to Gamers Nexus for such a well researched piece.

      • Sorry. I am not willing to watch a 47 minute video. If you can point to a summary in text I'll peruse it. Ultimately the question is, "Do the actions justify a lawsuit?"

        • Then do some fucking research before you open your fucking maw
          • Gee. You seem like a reasonable person. I would like to modify my behaviour to accommodate your expectations. Let me get right on that.

            • You seem like an unreasonable person who drive reasonable people insane. You're wrong and you're unwilling to even do the research to see how wrong you are, which is very wrong.

            • by kriston ( 7886 )

              Get off your high horse and watch the video.
              It's not overclocking that causes this problem.

        • Intel designed processors that are 100% guaranteed to physically destroy themselves over time and then knowingly sold them for years, lied through their teeth repeatedly when reports started coming in, tried to weasel out of warranty service, the works.

          This was 100% malicious premeditated fraud. They sold people something they knew would self-destruct and lied about it at every step of the way. A class action lawsuit isn't the right answer, a criminal investigation is.

          • Thanks for the summary. The difficulty I have with it is that the neutral facts are wrapped heavily in subjective accusations, and judgments of motive "in the dark", or misplaced on the timeline. Being wrong about something and learning it later is not lying at the time.

            I appreciate the point about criminal investigation. At first I couldn't see how it might lead to criminality, but it's complicated enough that some form of criminal fraud might be worth investigating. It's notoriously hard to prosecute in s

            • Being wrong about something and learning it later is not lying at the time.

              They weren't "wrong" about anything. That's the whole point. They knew for absolute certain what they had done and what would come of it from very early on, if not before release. They deliberately lied at literally every step of the way. This was absolutely 100% premeditated and malicious.

        • https://arstechnica.com/gadget... [arstechnica.com]

          > the elevated operating voltage is stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor.

          That's as succinct as one can get, but there is no information on the complexity of the issue.

          • Interesting. So I'm probably in the clear, given that I've had no issues and I've applied the BIOS patch.

            Thank you.

            • That's the fun part: you don't know. The damage may already have happened, but you might not have yet run a load that triggers it.

              Never ever buy a second hand an Intel 13th gen.

    • Class actions really need to be revised to make it both a) significant for the class members (so they actually get something meaningful) and b) so that lawyers fees and rewards are capped to a minimal percentage of proceeds to make 'a' actually happen.

      In many class actions, if a member isn't due an amount that allows the lawyers to make a profit, the amount awarded to that member is forfeit. Yes this happens. I had it happen on one of those class actions against a stock - I didn't hold enough to make the
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        What needs to be revised is the numbers involved. Government fines and lawsuit awards are still trapped in the 1950s. Even record breaking amounts are so pathetically small compared to companies' profits that they're not even a rounding error on an expense report. They're basically petty cash.

        What these lawsuits and fines need to do instead is start with 100% seizure of all revenues from the malicious action, erase the concept of a corporate veil for top level executives, and then on top of that seize porti

  • You don't even have to have an Intel CPU to have been harmed by Intel. II have seen more than one case where an open software project ended up spinning it's wheels tracking down a crash bug that turned out to be the Intel hardware bug.

Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach

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