The claim sits somewhat at odds with events of the past few months, when a power-delivery microcode bug damaged 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core chips. It comes from Puget Systems, one of the leading builders of workstation computers for individuals and businesses.
The company has just published statistics showing that the failure rate of the 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core chips it installs in the workstations it sells is just over 2%. By comparison, the failure rate for the two CPU generations built on the Zen 3 and Zen 4 architectures, sold as the Ryzen 5000 and 7000 series, is higher than 4%. However, relying on this claim alone, we cannot get a complete picture of the long-term durability of today's latest high-performance consumer processors.
Still, one thing is clear: the information Puget Systems has released will surprise many people, especially since the problems involving 13th and 14th Gen Core chips paired with 700- and 800-series chipset motherboards have not been fully resolved. What's more, there is no patch that can repair chips whose silicon die has already been damaged. The only option is to send them in under warranty for a replacement.
The situation among game developers around the world is the exact opposite. Game studios have published crash-report rates from the PCs of gamers, showing that in games that decompress data from the drive onto the CPU and GPU, the error rate on 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core chips ranges from 50 to 100%. In other words, if a game runs on Intel's latest chips, it is all but certain to crash.
An even more surprising piece of news for gamers is that Puget Systems says data supplied by its customers shows workstations using 11th Gen Intel Core chips, the Rocket Lake architecture, have an even higher rate of software and operating system errors and crashes than the 13th and 14th Gen parts.
Puget Systems released the information and data above together with an official announcement that it and Intel are extending CPU warranty coverage to 3 years for systems using 13th and 14th Gen Core chips. Intel's decision to extend its warranty from 2 years to 5 years was announced at the end of last week.
Puget's statement has offered the community some reassurance, because when Intel made its official announcement late last week, it only mentioned extending the warranty for retail-boxed consumer CPUs. There was still no word on "tray" CPUs, which come without a box or cooler and which Intel supplies to PC-building partners such as Puget, until Puget issued its own statement.
This means other PC makers and system builders will quite likely announce longer CPU warranties for PCs equipped with 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core chips in the near future as well.
Back to Raptor Lake, the 11th Gen Intel Core family. The data Puget provided shows a Raptor Lake failure rate of up to 7% in workstations used for professional work, which may surprise many people. The reason is that failures involving this processor generation are rarely heard about, so the cause is unclear, as is whether Intel has addressed the Raptor Lake issues in work machines.
Of course, as with any data on processor failure rates that doesn't come from the manufacturer, the figures from Puget Systems should be treated with caution. Intel and AMD will clearly never volunteer failure-rate figures for chips in systems that use their CPUs, so relying on data from Puget or other organizations is necessary. That said, there are reasons to be careful with Puget's data: the company does not deploy the full product lineup of each chip generation, and it also configures CPU clock speeds differently from the original specifications Intel provides for retail products.
On the first point, Puget has clarified that it only offers workstations with Core i7-XX700K and Core i9-XX900K chips, so failure rates are calculated only for these two SKUs in each Intel CPU generation. Interestingly, based on consumer feedback, the top-end chips of the Core 13 and 14 generations are also said to have the highest failure rates.
On clock speeds, Puget says that since 2017 it has no longer trusted the power-delivery and clock-speed specifications for CPUs from either AMD or Intel. Every workstation Puget builds uses its own custom BIOS, based on AMD's and Intel's CPU operating guidelines, with somewhat more conservative settings than aggressive overclocking options. This helps ensure the system's durability and reliability over long-term operation. According to Puget, this may be why the failure rate of Core 13 and 14 chips is lower than in many other areas of the tech industry, such as gaming.
Please take note of the chart above. It is a compilation of Intel CPU failures that Puget found at its own facility (shop), along with cases where customers reported CPU problems (field). Puget states that since the 11th Gen Core chips, Raptor Lake, it has recorded an unusually high failure rate for Intel CPUs, with the 13th and 14th Gen chips from customers.
Puget Systems president Jon Bach said: “We see that all chip failures occur within 6 months of the customer receiving the machine. In the short time ahead, our prediction is that the rate of failed chips will rise, even if Intel releases a microcode update to adjust the voltage supplied to the CPU.”
One notable factor is that the failure rate of Ryzen 5000 and 7000 series chips is relatively high, even though they launched in 2020 and 2022, respectively. Because so many machines have been sold over a long period, the failure rate has risen accordingly. By contrast, the 13th and 14th Gen Core lines were only introduced in 2022 and 2023, so they have been on the market for a shorter time.
Recent reports indicate that 13th Gen Intel CPUs are experiencing a “stable but rising failure rate,” while 14th Gen has seen a sharp spike in failures in recent months.
Mr. Bach stressed: “Looking at this data in context, the failure rate of 13th and 14th Gen Core chips is rising, but it hasn't reached an alarming level. The concern right now is not the failure rate already recorded but the long-term durability of these CPUs. If our assessment is correct, the failure rate of 14th Gen CPUs will likely keep climbing in the future, creating a bigger challenge for everyone, and this is something we will monitor closely.”
The problem facing PC users with 13th and 14th Gen Core chips is that they are not running their chips with the custom BIOS settings created and applied by Puget Systems. Instead, most use high-end gaming motherboards with Core i7 and Core i9 CPUs, which supply unusually high input voltage to the CPU to optimize game performance, and this in turn damages the chip's silicon die.
Source: Tom's Hardware
