[Nereuxofficial]

To answer the first question:

Yes and Intel has confirmed it. It should be fixed now but too high voltages can damage CPUs permanently so it probably means a lot of warrabty claims

See https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-cpu-in...

The problem is unlikely to be around the corner for AMD since they do not have to supply as much voltage to their chips as as Intel to keep up since they are - at least when it comes to x86 chips - currently leading in performance and power efficiency

[MaKey]

It is not fixed as Intel hasn't published their microcode update, which is lowering the voltages, yet.

[stingraycharles]

Which will likely affect performance as well, right? As I understood it, they were too ambitious with pushing performance using higher voltages, which now needs to be reduced using a microcode update?

[thyristan]

Either performance or stability/reliability. Or even both.

At higher frequencies (during a frequency boost phase for example) signal quality in the digital signals degrades, because the "stable 1" or "stable 0" plateau is shortened and the "maybe 1 or 0" phase in between stays the same. So a signal that is supposed to be as rectangular as possible gets smushed down towards a sinus, and then smushed even further towards lower amplitudes.

One measure against this is of course better (faster) transistors, such that the "maybe" phase is shorter, but that only works by replacing the hardware. The other measure, which you can do during runtime, is to increase the signal amplitude by increasing the voltage. Then even a degraded signal close to the transistors' maximum switching frequency gets over the "stable 1" and "stable 0" thresholds fast enough.

With a lower supply voltage you can thus not clock the CPU as high as before which is important in boost phases during high load. Which would decrease peak performance in standard desktop and server workloads, and decrease overall performance in compute-intensive workloads. Or if you still clock it as high as before, signal quality will be lessened, increasing the probability of bit errors, lessening system stability and reliability of results.

Which direction intel will pick for this firmware upgrade, degraded-performance, degraded-stability or degraded-both, I don't know, I guess we'll see.

[viraptor]

Maybe. I don't think anyone had information yet regarding the details. The extra power may have been just pure waste, rather than a performance improvement.

Unless I missed a real investigation posted somewhere?

[noverify]

> for AMD since they do not have to supply as much voltage to their chips

... unless you're using EXPO/XMP. I would really recommend people who run automatically overclocked memory taking a closer look at how much voltage the motherboard is pushing into your CPU, especially into the SoC. Some motherboards just push the voltages to the absolute permitted maximum; ASUS is particularly bad at this. I run lower RAM frequencies than my system is capable of because I haven't seen much performance improvement above 5600 "MHz", and it can be made to run at almost stock voltages.

It definitely causes faster silicon degradation; the question is how fast it will kill the processor. Both Intel and AMD have shown us that it can happen very quickly, not in the course of several decades as we've assumed for the longest time.