An engineer at Mozilla thinks Raptor Lake CPUs struggled during Europe's early July heatwave. He's pointing the finger at the notorious voltage bug that had customers up in arms last year. Intel addressed what it calls the "Vmin shift instability" with updated microcode, but Mozilla's Gabriele Svelto says he can see that the issue is alive and well, thanks to Firefox browser crash data.
"If you have an Intel Raptor Lake system and you're in the northern hemisphere, chances are that your machine is crashing more often because of the summer heat," Svelto wrote in a Mastodon post . "I know because I can literally see which EU countries have been affected by heat waves by looking at the locales of Firefox crash reports coming from Raptor Lake systems."
Europe has experienced severe heatwaves this year, including one in early July that reached 40°C (104°F) and reportedly led to about 2,300 deaths. (The death toll was drawn from 12 European cities.) With air conditioning less prevalent in Europe than in the US, many PCs in Europe are undoubtedly experiencing higher-than-average temperatures.
Whether the Raptor Lake bug is truly responsible for the Firefox crashes isn't certain, but it's easy to see why Svelto thinks the CPUs are to blame. And he apparently was seeing quite a few crashes at the height of the heat wave.
"Things are so bad at this time that we had to disable a bot that was filing crash reports automatically because it was almost only finding crashes from people with affected systems," Svelto wrote.
ExtremeTech's sibling publication, PCMag , received an update from Intel on the issue that read: "Intel is looking into the claims by Mr. Svelto. Intel recommends users reach out to Intel Customer Support (if box/tray processors purchased from a retailer) or their system vendor's support team if they are experiencing issues are experiencing issue with their Intel-powered systems."
Credit: Intel
As Intel explained in a statement last September, the Vmin shift instability is due to a problematic clock tree circuit in the CPU. The flaw is in Intel's 13th and 14th Generation CPUs. Various things, including Microcode and BIOS code, can request high voltages, which can trigger Vmin shift. Too much heat appears to be a potential factor. Though Intel mitigated the issue with a microcode update, it seems possible that many CPUs out there are still vulnerable for one reason or another. It will be interesting to see what Intel reports back about its findings.
