Intel processors behave strangely during the summer heat. This was reported by… the developer of Firefox.
Mozilla has been receiving a huge number of reports of browser crashes, most of which are related to systems with Intel Raptor Lake processors, which are known to be not very stable. Senior engineer Gabriele Svelto wrote on Mastodon that a large number of browser crash reports are coming from Intel Raptor Lake-based systems located in areas suffering from heat.
«If you have an Intel Raptor Lake system and you’re in the northern hemisphere, there’s a chance that your computer is more likely to crash due to the summer heat. I know this because I can literally see which EU countries are affected by the heat by looking at the localizations of Firefox crash reports coming from Raptor Lake systems».
The problem of instability in Intel processors was discovered last year. It took the company several months to find the cause. Because it is a matter of physical degradation, no patches can completely eliminate instability — Intel microcode updates only softened it. The month before last Intel has released another update to the 0x12F microcode to solve the problem of changing Vmin. However, Svelto says that this version is also unstable.
«Raptor Lake systems have known synchronization/voltage issues that get worse with temperature. Things are now so bad that we had to turn off the bot that automatically sends outage reports because it was finding outages almost exclusively from people with affected systems».
Fortunately, Intel has extended the warranty on all damaged 13th and 14th generation chips from three to five years. So users facing this issue with these processors can apply for a replacement.
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