The mobile issue seems more anecdote than data? Almost as if people on Reddit heard the 13/14 CPUs were bad, then their laptop crashed, and they decided "it happened to me too".
The problem may exist, but Alderon Games' report on the mobile chip is more of an anecdote here because there's not enough data points (unlike their desktop claims), and the only SKU they give (13900HX) is actually a desktop chip in a mobile package (BGA instead of LGA, so we're back into the original issue). So in the end, even with Alderon's claims, there's really not enough data points to come to a conclusion on the mobile side of things.
> "The laptops crash in the exact same way as the desktop parts including workloads under Unreal Engine, decompression, ycruncher or similar. Laptop chips we have seen failing include but not limited to 13900HX etc.," Cassells said.
> "Intel seems to be down playing the issues here most likely due to the expensive costs related to BGA rework and possible harm to OEMs and Partners," he continued. "We have seen these crashes on Razer, MSI, Asus Laptops and similar used by developers in our studio to work on the game. The crash reporting data for my game shows a huge amount of laptops that could be having issues."
I'm not denying that the problem exists, but I don't think Alderon provided enough data to come to a conclusion, unlike on the desktop, where it's supported by other parties in addition to Alderon's data (where you can largely point to 14900KS/K/non-K/T, 13900KS/K/non-K/T, 14700K, and 13700K being the one affected)
Right now, the only example given is HX (which is a repackaged desktop chip[^], as mentioned), so I'm not denying that the problem is happening on HX based on their claims (and it makes a lot of sense that HX is affected! See below), but what about H CPUs? What about P CPUs? What about U CPUs? The difference in impact between "only HX is impacted" and "HX/H/P/U parts are all affected" is a few orders of magnitude (a very top-end 13th Gen mobile SKUs versus every 13th Gen mobile SKUs). Currently, we don't have enough data how widespread the issue is, and that makes it difficult to assess who is impacted by this issue from this data alone.
[^]: HX is the only mobile CPU with B0 stepping, which is the same as desktop 13th/14th Gen, while the mobile H/P/U family are J0 and Q0, which are essentially a higher clocked 12th Gen (i.e., using Golden Cove rather than Raptor Cove)
Alderon are the people claiming 100% of units fail which doesn’t seem supported by anyone else either. Wendell and GN seem to have scoped the issue to around 10-25% across multiple different sources.
Like they are the most extreme claimants at this point. Are they really credible?
For server CPUs there's not a similar problem or they realize server purchasers may be less willing to tolerate it? I'm not all that thrilled with the prospect of buying Intels especially when wondering about waiting to 5 year out replacement compared to a few generations ago, but AMD server choices can be a bit limited and I'm not really sure how to evaluate if there may be increasing surprises more across the board.
Are you talking about Xeon Scalable? Although they share the same core design as the desktop counterpart (Xeon Scalable 4th Gen shares the same Golden Cove as 12th Gen, Xeon Scalable 5th Gen shares the same Raptor Cove as 13th/14th Gen), they're very different from the desktop counterpart (monolithic vs tile/EMIB-based, ring bus vs mesh, power gate vs FIVR), and often running in a more conservative configuration (lower max clock, more conservative V/F curves, etc.). There has been a rumor about Xeon Scalable 5th Gen having the same issue, but it's more of a gossip rather than a data point.
The issue does happen with desktop chips that are being used in a server context when pairing with workstation chipset such as W680. However, there haven't been any reports of Xeon E-2400/E-3400 (which is essentially a desktop chip repurposed as a server) with C266 having these issues, though it may be because there hasn't been a large deployment of these chips on the server just yet (or even if there are, it's still too early to tell).
Do note that even without this particular issue, Xeon Scalable 4th Gen (Sapphire Rapids) is not a good chip (speaking from experience, I'm running w-3495x). It has plenty of issues such as slow clock ramp, high latency, high idle power draw, and the list goes on. While Xeon Scalable 5th Gen (Emerald Rapids) seems to have fixed most of these issues, Zen 4 EPYC is still a much better choice.