The story surrounding Intel’s crashing Core i9-13900K and 14900K processors is growing by the day. As more people start investigating the issue, various potential causes are being reported. “Moore’s Law is Dead” has also reported on this story, citing OEM engineers and Intel insiders familiar with the R&D of the Raptor Lake processors.
It turns out that the design for Raptor Lake was finalized in record time, taking just 11 months to go from diagrams to the product launch. With such a short development cycle, quality testing must have been very limited. Consequently, there’s a chance that the updated Golden Cove->Raptor Cove design, which is essentially an L2 cache inflation (1.25 MB -> 2 MB), may suffer from a fatal flaw.
Considering that the primary (sole) difference between Golden and Raptor Cove boils down to the L2 cache, it’s highly probable that the crashing/instability is also related to the cache. From what I recall, the 13th Gen CPUs use a faster compute fabric (by up to 900 MHz) which may have something to do with the instability. It would also explain why disabling the E-cores alleviates the issue at times.
Previous coverage on the Intel Core i9-13900K/14900K crashing saga:
- PC Gamers are Switching to AMD Ryzen as Intel 13900K/14900K Chips Continue to Crash & Fail.
- Intel 13th/14th Gen CPUs have a ~100% Failure Rate? Decay Gradually & Start Crashing.
- After 3 Faulty CPUs & 2 RMAs, Intel Refuses to Refund a Crashing 13900K, Less than a Month Old.
- Intel i9-13900K/14900K Highly Unstable in The First Descendant: Crashes Every 5 Mins.
