Dylan Browne, an Unreal Engine Supervisor and Feature Film VFX at the ModelFarm visual effects studio, posted on X that his company is experiencing a 50% failure rate for systems powered by Intel’s Core i9-13900K and 14900K processors. As a result, the company is deploying AMD’s as-yet-unreleased Zen 5 Ryzen 9 9950X processors in place of Intel-powered solutions, with Browne praising AMD’s single-thread performance.
The report represents yet another piece of unwelcome news for Intel, which announced yesterday that it had found the root cause of the issues and will issue a microcode mitigation in mid-August. (This isn’t a ‘fix’ for CPUs experiencing the issue — impacted processors are irreversibly damaged and must be replaced.)
The problems with Unreal Engine aren’t entirely unexpected, as early reports of the Intel crashes revolved around the Oodle compression used with the game engine. The news that ModelFarm is dropping Intel CPUs follows game studio Alderon Games’ announcement that Intel desktop CPUs have a 100% crash rate, and laptop chips of the same generation are also affected. However, Intel has now disputed the claims of laptop failures.
For those curious at work our failure rate for our 13900k and 14900k machines is about 50% so far, any new machine builds going to be 9950x’s, production environments need reliability#intelJuly 23, 2024
Browne claimed that two brand-new processors immediately exhibited instability, while a few others took some time to exhibit symptoms. The computers were all focused on Unreal Engine work, which works best with multi-core systems.
Browne is “fairly sure” that most of the unstable systems use Asus ROG motherboards but will provide an update with more specifics later. However, the Intel chips exhibited instability even with lower power limits. Browne said the motherboards of the affected CPUs have already been tweaked, but that didn’t seem to help with the problems the Core i9-14900Ks and 13900Ks were experiencing.
Intel has acknowledged the issue and announced a solution to the instability problem yesterday. However, the microcode patch to address the problem isn’t expected to arrive until mid-August, so we’re unsure if this will truly stop the crashes. Nevertheless, businesses cannot wait that long for a system that doesn’t suffer from this issue, and Browne said that any new machines for the studio he’s working at will use AMD Ryzen 9950X chips.
The Ryzen 9000 series is expected to become available on store shelves on July 31, but some retailers have already added them to their online stores. Nevertheless, some organizations likely already have early samples of the chips for testing under NDA, and ModelFarm seems to be among them.
When another X user asked the 9950X’s single-threaded performance, Dylan said that chips were “Pretty damn good, especially the newer ones.” While he did not give specific details, we can extrapolate from his response that Browne is likely talking about the latest AMD processors. Browne responded with a follow-up Tweet to the question, saying that his “5950X is good for single-threaded [performance]and they get better every [generation]not to mention having all core being equal unlike most of Intel’s chips.”
Intel says its patch will address the instability issues in August. Regardless, it has a serious scandal on its hands that could put some extra wind in AMD’s sails right as it launches the Ryzen 9000 series at the end of July.
