Intel CPUs are crashing once more throughout summer time heatwaves, Firefox dev warns
Europe’s summer time heatwave could also be highlighting Intel’s “Raptor Lake” bug otherwise: customers might haven’t paid consideration on tips on how to patch it, and their techniques are crashing because of this.
Gabriele Svelto, an engineer for Mozilla, posted that he may basically geolocate crash studies (which establish the processor, presumably) and tie them to areas which have suffered from a latest European warmth wave.
“In case you have an Intel Raptor Lake system and also you’re within the northern hemisphere, chances are high that your machine is crashing extra usually due to the summer time warmth,” Svelto wrote on Mastodon. “I do know as a result of I can actually see which EU nations have been affected by warmth waves by trying on the locales of Firefox crash studies coming from Raptor Lake techniques.”
“Raptor Lake techniques have identified timing/voltage points that worsen with temperature,” Svelto added. “Issues are so dangerous right now that we needed to disable a bot that was submitting crash studies robotically as a result of it was virtually solely discovering crashes from individuals with affected techniques.”
On the Mozilla bug tracker, one engineer wrote: “Suhaib deployed a change to bugbot that makes it ignore crashes from this CPU so hopefully we received’t get so many going ahead.”
A repair is accessible
Intel’s “Raptor Lake” bug affected processors throughout 2024, particularly Intel’s Thirteenth-gen and 14th-gen desktop Core chips — not these present in laptops. Flawed microcode allowed the desktop chips to run at elevated working voltages, which may trigger the techniques to crash.
The issue, Intel ultimately discovered, was that after an affected chip had crashed, the degradation was irreversible. Final August, Intel prolonged its guarantee on affected processors from three to 5 years to assist alleviate the issue.
From June 23 to July 2, Europe suffered its worst warmth wave ever, with temperatures climbing to over 104 in nations like Spain, Portugal and France. Europe doesn’t have practically the prevalence of air-con that North American firms do, which implies that European fans have been already coping with ambient temperatures far increased than regular, then tacking on the warmth from their CPU and GPU as properly.
Though there isn’t any treatment for the Raptor Lake bug, it may be mitigated. Intel beneficial that customers obtain an up to date UEFI/BIOS from their motherboard producer, which might place tighter constraints on the processor to keep away from overheating.
It’s unknown whether or not these crashes have been in truth unpatched Raptor Lake techniques, however Svento’s evaluation was most likely a very good guess. Apply these patches now!
