Intel Raptor Lake CPUs are crashing more frequently due to summer heatwaves, Firefox dev says

[Alfonso Maruccia]

Facepalm: Instability issues with Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs continue to affect users worldwide. Even web browsers are reportedly "feeling the heat," with an uptick in crash reports, particularly in regions experiencing intense summer temperatures.

Mozilla Firefox has now joined the growing list of software affected by the Raptor Lake instability issues that Intel first acknowledged in 2024. According to Mozilla Staff Platform Engineer Gabriele Svelto, the open-source browser is experiencing a noticeable increase in crashes – particularly in regions currently facing high summer temperatures.

Svelto said that users in the Northern Hemisphere are being hit the hardest, and that he could tell which European countries were experiencing heat waves just by looking at Firefox crash reports. Most of these logs came from systems powered by Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs.

Raptor Lake processors are known to suffer from timing and voltage irregularities that worsen as temperatures rise. The issue, commonly referred to as Vmin Shift, can potentially cause permanent CPU damage by supplying unsafe voltage levels. Intel has attempted to mitigate the problem with several firmware and microcode updates, the most recent of which was released just a few weeks ago.

The situation has became so problematic that Mozilla was recently forced to disable a bot designed to automatically send crash reports back to the foundation's servers. The bot was overwhelmingly detecting crash instances on systems running Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs, prompting developers to filter out reports from those specific models.

Svelto confirmed that the issue is 100 percent an Intel problem, adding that a significant portion of the crashes were coming from machines powered by the popular Core i7-14700K processor. During the discussion, he even reached out to one seemingly unaffected user with a stable Raptor Lake system, asking them to test the latest Firefox Nightly build.

Mozilla is currently experimenting with a new library that's not yet ready for general release, but it could trigger the Vmin Shift bug "very frequently" during testing, Svelto warned.

The latest wave of Firefox crashes adds to the growing chorus of concern surrounding Intel's 13th- and 14th-generation CPUs. With continued instability, some users are now being advised to steer clear of Raptor Lake chips until Intel resolves the issue. In the meantime, AMD appears to be benefiting from the fallout, gaining ground with its highly stable Ryzen processors. Intel is reportedly working to restore user confidence with its upcoming Arrow Lake architecture, but the road ahead may be steep.

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Intel Raptor Lake CPUs are crashing more frequently due to summer heatwaves, Firefox dev says

 

[DrSuess]

If CPUs are crashing due to heatwaves, Intel is pushing the thermal specs to hard. We know what is coming next a microcode update that cause the CPU to throttle itself more aggressively turning your high end CPU into a mid range marvel.

 

[HardReset]

Like I have been saying for looong time, Intel Hybrid Architecture is total failure. Major thing it was "supposed" to do is power saving. We see now how well that went. Everything else on Hybrid is just trash so nothing actually works.

 

[MSIGamer]

If CPUs are crashing due to heatwaves, Intel is pushing the thermal specs to hard. We know what is coming next a microcode update that cause the CPU to throttle itself more aggressively turning your high end CPU into a mid range marvel.

This already happened lol. Raptor lake with all the patches is significantly slower than it was at launch.
My 7950x3d now beats it at code compiling while raptor lake was slightly faster at launch.
And don't think about 9950 lol.
Plus you don't have the e-core core scheduling garbage. Intel is a nightmare atm. Even when it doesn't crash it just behaves terribly.
It could be fast if it would run within thermal spec, but good luck finding any cooling solution that can adequately cool these things.
Complete joke.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Alder lake doest have issues with the heat. Raptor lake was just an absolute failure of a CPU design.

 

[magoid]

All of this because marketing wanted slightly longer strips on the benchmark graphics in the internet. Intel have a strong fanbase that will not touch a AMD CPU even if those were 50% faster. In my workplace, all those office PCs have Intel CPUs in them, it didn't matter AMD was slightly ahead on the benchmarks.

Now with that "ahead in the benchmarks at all costs" nonsense damaging Intel's reputation, they decided to clock down Arrow Lake a bit to not make things worse.

 

[amghwk]

The fall of Intel has begun....

 

[daffy duck]

Like I have been saying for looong time, Intel Hybrid Architecture is total failure. Major thing it was "supposed" to do is power saving. We see now how well that went. Everything else on Hybrid is just trash so nothing actually works.

Don't blame the hybrid architecture, blame Intel pushing the Raptor Lake design beyond reasonable limits to try and compete with AMD. Raptor Lake was an incredibly rushed follow up to Alder Lake which does not suffer such woes. Insiders have revealed Raptor Lake took only about a year to design and validate and there had already been warnings from Alder Lake engineers about trying to push too much voltage into the ringbus which is now the major problem with Raptor Lake. Meanwhile the media were cheering Intel on all along until problems started appearing. Then they quickly changed their tunes.

Arrow Lake of course did a lot to ensure this did not happen again and of course now the ringbus is much slower, but will probably last the distance.

 

[AlexIL]

It's not Intel to blame but environmental changes. Thirty years ago summers was much calmer than this owen we have everywhere today. With progression like this we'll be driving horses in August since everything will be melting down due to temperatures. Intel design wasn't meant for this.