February 2024's tech news

Intel CPU stability

It looks like either motherboard manufacturers’ habitual disregard for Intel power limit specs has finally got them in trouble, or Intel has cut some stability margins a bit too close on some high-end CPUs. One way or another, some people are having stability issues with the 13700K, 13900K, 14700K, and 14900K (at least). The developers of Oodle (compression middleware for games) have debugged this a bit and gotten some official guidance from Intel. Others have other fixes.

I’m not too concerned that this is a situation in the first place; stuff happens. I am a bit concerned about Intel’s advice (relayed at the Oodle link), which boils down to “boost the voltage until it works right”. It’s sketchy and they can do better.

If the problem is more with the motherboard manufacturers, that would probably be because Intel has only validated this stuff up to 253W and incorrect motherboard default settings are letting the CPUs draw 350+W sometimes. If this is the case, the correct course of action for Intel is to advise users who are having problems to lower PL2 to something reasonable and then get the mobo defaults fixed (which Intel has plenty of leverage to do even if they don’t have direct control). Nobody wants to do this because it lowers performance a little bit (more in benchmarks than in real-world use), but if this is what’s going on, it’s time to get serious about it anyway. If Intel can’t live without that performance, they need to be validating their top parts up to 320W or more (and putting that on spec sheets).

If the problem is more with Intel, that probably means they just cut stability margins a bit too close. If this is the case, they have three basic options:

• Either reduce performance slightly in the problematic region via BIOS updates or advise users to tune in a way that does the same. Nobody wants to do this for obvious reasons, but realistically it’s not a bad option for a lot of people and it’s not unprecedented (security mitigations have reduced performance post-launch before).

• Either increase voltages (and power draw / heat / wear rate) slightly in the problematic region via BIOS updates or advise users to tune in a way that does the same. This is bad in less obvious ways than reducing performance, but if Intel advises users to monkey with voltages to fix this (which is what they are actually doing) then they have an extra responsibility: they need to make it crystal clear to users what is and is not covered by warranty. I don’t have any real doubt that if someone takes this advice, finds they need +0.050V to get stable, and has their CPU die at 2.5 years, Intel will do the right thing, but that still shouldn’t be a source of anxiety for anyone. What happens if someone inexperienced in this area slips a zero, puts in +0.25V instead of +0.025V, and fries the CPU that way? We shouldn’t have to ask.

• Replace CPUs that aren’t stable at default settings under warranty. They’ll do this if you ask, but they could be clearer when talking about the issue that this is an option for anyone affected. Also, if they’re recommending voltage boosts they need to specify a maximum voltage boost; if someone has to use +0.100V to get stable, that CPU isn’t going to last forever, and getting started on a warranty claim ASAP is much better for everyone involved.

Hopefully we get BIOS updates and/or some more comprehensive communication from Intel soon.

Component pricing and availability updates

• The RX 7900 GRE is now available worldwide. It’s $550, which is roughly in line with its performance when comparing against the $500 7800 XT.

• The RX 7700 XT is officially down to $420 (it’s currently actually $410 for the Sapphire Pulse and ASRock Challenger OC, but I’m not sure that’s meaningful long-term). That brings its performance per dollar to parity with the 7800 XT’s at $500.

• The RTX 4080 Super is starting to be more regularly in stock at its MSRP of $1000.

• There are a bunch of pretty good deals on RDNA2 cards right now. The 6600 XT is $230, the 6650 XT is $240, the 6750 XT is $340, the 6800 is $380, and the 6800 XT is $460. Stock levels of all of these are looking a bit shaky these days, so get them while they’re hot.

• Lots of AMD CPUs got price drops. In particular, the R7 7800X3D and R9 7900 are both down to $370, the R5 7600X is down to $220, the R9 7900X3D is down to $410, and the R5 5500 is down to $90.

Links

• AMD has released the Radeon RX 7900 GRE worldwide (it’s already been around a while in some markets). It’s $550 and outperforms the $500 7800 XT by around 10% (more in compute-heavy work and less in bandwidth-heavy work). GamersNexus and TechPowerUp (Sapphire Pulse, Sapphire Pure, Sapphire Nitro+, ASRock Steel Legend) have solid reviews of it.

• Some CableMod angled 12VHPWR adapters have been recalled as a fire hazard.

• The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that legislation that keeps service providers from offering functional end-to-end encryption is incompatible with article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

• Groq says AI companies don’t want Nvidia to find out they’re interested in competitors’ products because Nvidia will delay shipments. (The original source appears to be the Wall Street Journal, but that article is paywalled.)

• Nvidia is unifying their Control Panel and GeForce Experience into Nvidia App.

• Disney is acquiring a $1.5 billion stake in Epic Games.

• Nintendo sued the developers of Yuzu, a Switch emulator, and they settled for $2.4 million.

• Elon Musk is suing OpenAI (which he co-founded) and its CEO Sam Altman, claiming that OpenAI has left behind its founding agreement to be a non-profit working for the good of humanity rather than the good of shareholders.

• Microsoft is introducing DirectSR. It’s a common interface for DLSS, FSR, and XeSS, letting developers support all three without dealing with each individually.

• It looks like open-source graphics drivers will continue to have major challenges supporting HDMI 2.1+, due to secrecy requirements imposed by the HDMI Forum (which creates the specs). HDMI 2.0 tops out at 4K60, 1440p144, or 1080p240, and doesn’t support adaptive sync. If you’re using an open-source graphics driver on Linux and any of that is important to you, you’ll want to use DisplayPort instead.

• Nitter is dead, for real this time. Thread Reader also seems to have reduced some functionality, I’d guess for related reasons. If you’re like me and aren’t going to get accounts anywhere but sometimes want to see context of tweets that people send you links to, that seems to not be possible anymore. If you’re a Twitter user who shares Twitter links in non-Twitter spaces, be aware that what people without Twitter accounts can see is extremely limited.

• Chips and Cheese has dug into the details of Qualcomm’s Adreno 730, the GPU used in their Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 mobile SoC.