Do not trust Intel

So, this story's been percolating for a while, but it seems to be coming to a head all of a sudden, and is providing a number of object lessons is how not to do any of this in the process.

Long story short: Intel 13th and 14th gen processors (a.k.a. Raptor Lake, and including essentially all CPUs made and sold from October of 2022 to the present), have a degeneration issue. For details on the nature of the problem, your best bet is probably Wendell at Level1Techs, or Steve at Gamer's Nexus, or both.

The situation is developing rapidly, though, and Intel are failing to get ahead of it. The latest reporting comes from Ars Technica:

On Monday, it initially seemed like the beginning of the end for Intel’s desktop CPU instability woes — the company confirmed a patch is coming in mid-August that should address the “root cause” of exposure to elevated voltage. But if your 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processor is already crashing, that patch apparently won’t fix it.

Citing unnamed sources, Tom’s Hardware reports that any degradation of the processor is irreversible, and an Intel spokesperson did not deny that when we asked. Intel is “confident” the patch will keep it from happening in the first place. [...] But if your defective CPU has been damaged, your best option is to replace it instead of tweaking BIOS settings to try and alleviate the problems.

And, Intel confirms, too-high voltages aren’t the only reason some of these chips are failing. Intel spokesperson Thomas Hannaford confirms it’s a primary cause, but the company is still investigating. Intel community manager Lex Hoyos also revealed some instability reports can be traced back to an oxidization manufacturing issue that was fixed at an unspecified date last year.

This raises lots of questions. Will Intel recall these chips? Extend their warranty? Replace them no questions asked? Pause sales like AMD just did with its Ryzen 9000? Identify faulty batches with the manufacturing defect?

This is bad. This is epic levels of bad, and may be Boeing levels of bad.

Futility, thy name is XBox

I was looking over the VGChartz table that I linked in my previous post, and I noticed something interesting.

I used VGChartz's Tie-Ratio tab for my cost-benefit analysis of Game Pass, but gaming system Tie-Ratios aren't the only data available to us. Tie-Ratio is the number of games sold for every console. To calculate a Tie Ratio, you naturally must know: 1. the number of games sold, and 2. the number of consoles sold. And VGChartz have, helpfully, broken those numbers out separately.

And if you switch from Tie-Ratio to just look at the hardware numbers, you can see something interesting.

Microsoft changes the deal

XBox Game Pass, already not the best deal in gaming, has just become a worse deal. As reported by Polygon:

Microsoft has announced sweeping changes to the pricing and structure of its Game Pass subscription service. There are price rises across the board; Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is going up to $19.99/month, an increase of $3. And the basic console tier is to be phased out and replaced with a new Xbox Game Pass Standard tier that will not include day one releases like the forthcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

The changes were reported by Windows Central and confirmed by Microsoft on an official Xbox support page.

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