Instabilities continue to plague 13th and 14th Gen Intel Core processors, several months after the manufacturer officially acknowledged the issues. Initially, these problems appeared limited to desktop SKUs, but new evidence suggests mobile models might not be immune.
For those out of the loop, Intel acknowledged issues with Raptor Lake (13th Gen) and Raptor Lake Refresh (14th Gen) processors back in April 2024. After three months of investigations, the company has still yet to identify the cause of the problem. Frustratingly for Team Blue, the crashes symptomatic of these instabilities primarily affect the best CPUs it has to offer for its Socket LGA 1700 motherboards. To make matters worse, one developer is now reporting crashes on some mobile chips too.
Matthew Cassells, founder of Alderon Games, has damningly declared that “Intel is selling defective 13-14th Gen CPUs” in a blog post on the developer’s website. Responding to a thread on Reddit highlighting the post, Cassells claims, “We have several laptops that have failed with the same crashes. It’s just slightly more rare then [sic] the desktop CPU faults.”
If true, this is naturally unsettling news for Intel and owners of 13th and 14th Gen processors across desktop and mobile devices. Prior attempts to address the problem via Intel Baseline Profile BIOS updates have proven unsuccessful, with a large number of Core i9 CPUs still showing signs of instability. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that the problem isn’t architectural at heart, but it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility.
With the launch of Arrow Lake looming, Intel needs to address this issue to prevent it from affecting prospective sales. After all, its Raptor Lake problems have already cost game developers up to $100K in losses, with the amount only likely to grow as the problem remains.
