this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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[–] Laser@feddit.org 110 points 3 months ago (5 children)

50%?

HOLY FUCKING SHIT

These are absolutely disastrous numbers. This is worse than I would expect from illegally sources parts.

[–] Sweetpeaches69@lemmy.world 37 points 3 months ago

Better off buying from Temu at that failure rate.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 9 points 3 months ago

This is probably a worse rate than all those motherboards years ago with the fucked up capacitors.

We had fucking stacks of them.

[–] Monomate@lemm.ee 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Why are grey market CPU parts more prone to failure? For GPUs I can understand due to possible mining usage, but CPUs too?

[–] Laser@feddit.org 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Grey market chips usually include chips that failed quality assurance to prop up numbers.

[–] Monomate@lemm.ee 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Most CPUs I've found in these Chinese sites claim they're used parts, probably from old servers from Chinese companies, which explains the amount of Xeons being offered. But if the part comes in the original box, why would Intel/AMD create an official package for these failed QA parts?

[–] nomous@lemmy.world 17 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Counterfeit packaging seems easy enough to produce.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago

Especially if the original CPUs are being packaged up in China. The people selling used / counterfeit processors could just go to the same source and get the same boxes.

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

If they're swiping failed QA chips, it's easy to swipe a couple boxes at the same time.

[–] werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

I'm ready for the eBay batch purchase.....batch of 10 please!

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I'm curious about the timeframe for failures though. Like, if these machines are being used for feature film VFX, I wouldn't be surprised if the CPU is running at near 100%, 24/7 for months on end. If it fails after 6 months under those conditions, a typical home user might be able to go years without an issue. Of course, there would probably be unlucky people who have problems long before that.

It's also interesting that we're not hearing anything from Amazon, Google or Microsoft. They use Intel-based servers and they also push them hard. Are they not seeing these problems, or are they just not talking about them? If they're not seeing them, is it safe to push the affected Intel CPUs hard as long as you avoid very specific code / algorithms?

[–] Laser@feddit.org 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The news is about Core i9 CPUs, which are the enthusiast / possibly workstation offering by Intel with high single core clock speeds. Amazon, Google and Microsoft use server CPUs which usually don't feature such high speeds, but rather focus on more cores and more possible RAM.

However, if a vendor sells a product with the main feature of high clock speeds and the product fails when I'm using that exact feature for prolonged periods of time, I'd say it's faulty.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago

Amazon, Google and Microsoft probably do mostly use server CPUs, but I'd be surprised if there weren't a few special projects that used specialized desktop CPUs. And, at their scale "a few special projects" probably means a few hundred machines.

But yeah, clearly these CPUs are faulty.