CheckMag | Intel's own blunders have it backed into a corner as AMD Zen 5 chips near

Efficiency cores? They're anything but. After 6 months of running at a toasty 290W, Intel's i9-13900K/14900K CPUs started to misbehave, bringing about the system crashes that many users are currently grappling with. Despite Intel pushing out BIOS updates to combat this issue, Warframe developers recently shared that close to 80% of the players' crash reports are from Raptor Lake i9-based systems with some spillover to the i7s of the same product families which is just staggering. In the meantime, Alderon Games claims a 100% crash rate with Raptor Lake. Worse still, game servers utilizing these i9 chips suffer from stability issues as well, with a game developer reportedly facing losses of up to $100,000 due to rampant server crashes. Certain companies now tell their customers to stay away from Intel's latest offerings and servers powered by Intel chips, recommending the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X among other AMD options instead and saying that AMD chips are just more stable.

So far, there has been no official statement from Intel regarding these issues. It seems that the company may either be too afraid to admit its mistakes or is riding on the hopes of upcoming Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs turning things around for it. The latter seems reasonable considering how power-efficient these new chips are tipped to be, if it wasn't for the elephant in the room that is the ongoing Raptor Lake controversy.

A long list of unhappy clients

Nvidia was the first to call Intel out for their unstable CPUs, revealing in 552.12 driver notes that it observed "stability issues, out of memory error messages, and crashes to desktop while the game is compiling shaders". A few weeks later, Intel hit back, putting the blame on motherboard manufacturers that supposedly "have been removing thermal and power protections in order to push out as much performance as possible". The workarounds suggested at the time included limiting the CPU's power target and disabling its E-cores. Then, a couple months later, various crashes started to affect Raptor Lake/Alder Lake Core i9-powered systems en masse.

The problem appears to be very widespread and on the rise as even Raptor Lake Core HX chips reportedly suffer from stability issues according to a comment from Alderon that states that "Intel is selling defective 13th/14th gen CPUs". 

A window of opportunity for AMD

As Intel is busy trying to put out the dumpster fire that Raptor Lake is, leaks hint that Zen 5 is going to take power efficiency to a whole new level. Tom's Hardware states that while the Ryzen 9 9950X retains the same 170W TDP as the last-gen 7950X, the former performs at least 17% better than the latter at 160W with its advantage going up to 24% at max power draw. The rest of the lineup is slated to have a lower TDP than their immediate predecessors while achieving better performance per watt than Zen 4, if the latest benchmark leaks on the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X are anything to go by.

Seeing how Intel is handling their current debacle with Raptor Lake, we may be about to witness a shift in loyalties on the CPU market. Going heavy on E-cores and wattage has clearly backfired on Intel as rapid degradation is something that should never happen to chips used for just 6 months. Arrow Lake performance leaks paint a promising picture but this won't matter if Intel customers get scared of another Raptor Lake situation, and the fact that some people are now advocating the use of Ryzen 9s for stability reasons is not helping in the slightest. As Intel continues to stubbornly ignore the problem, the hole Team Blue finds itself in is getting deeper and deeper, and it's only by speaking out that it will be able to get back on the right track. Regardless of Intel's response and decisions, their missteps in handling the Raptor Lake and Alder Lake situation have already affected the company's reputation with the extent of this damage yet to be seen.