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.
“If you have an Intel Raptor Lake system and you’re in the northern hemisphere, chances are that your machine is crashing more often because of the summer heat,” says Svelto. “I know because I can literally see which EU countries have been affected by heat waves by looking at the locales of Firefox crash reports coming from Raptor Lake systems.” The engineer even added that it has gotten so bad that the team disabled the bot, which filed these crash reports automatically, especially since these events almost exclusively happened to Intel Raptor Lake PCs — specifically, the Intel Core i7-14700K model.
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”.
Thankfully, Intel extended the warranty for all the affected chips from three to five years. So, if you’re one of the millions of users affected by this issue, and you have a dead Raptor Lake CPU, you can RMA it and get a replacement.
These CPU instability issues have caused Intel to lose ground to AMD in the desktop PC market share, and its Arrow Lake chips performed poorly in sales, exacerbating the company’s financial problems. In comparison, AMD has been releasing excellent gaming processors, especially the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D chip, which eclipses even Intel’s latest offerings in several gaming benchmarks.
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