Intel CPU owners might be crashing "because of the summer heat" says Firefox dev

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Summer is heating up in the Northern Hemisphere, and one developer at Mozilla has made an interesting connection between the sweltering heat and crashes on Intel-based PCs. Gabriele Svelto, a Staff Platform Engineer at Mozilla Corporation, claims that there is a chance that your Intel Raptor Lake system – those running one of Intel’s 13th or 14th generation processors – may be crashing “because of the summer heat”.

You may remember that Intel had a tough time tackling instability problems on its Raptor Lake CPUs. There was a whole saga of microcode updates last year to address the ongoing issues before releasing its latest Intel Core Ultra chips. A recent update to Raptor Lake, a couple of months ago, also addressed instability issues for machines that were “running for multiple days“.

Your Intel Raptor Lake processor might be overheating

By tracking the locales of Firefox crash reports, Svelto was able to link ongoing heatwaves in Europe to crashes on Intel Raptor Lake systems. Not everyone will be affected, of course, but it’s an interesting connection to make with the data to back it up. This even led to Mozilla having to disable a crash report bot because it was “almost only” finding crashes on Raptor Lake.

The 13th and 14th gen chips struggled with degradation issues due to elevated operating voltages, leading to system instability, crashes. Svelto notes that these processors “have known timing/voltage issues that get worse with temperature“.

Source: Mastodon

In response to the post, one user says they guess they’ve “been lucky so far,” though some deeper digging suggests that the problem is unlikely to affect their mobile i7-1360P CPU. In contrast, Svelto says they’ve had “plenty of crash reports” from the popular mid-range i7-14700K processor.

AMD has been running away with CPU sales for a while now, especially among gamers who value Team Red’s unique X3D processors. On top of that, Intel’s latest processors haven’t been so popular, especially since they arrived soon after the widely-reported 13th & 14th gen problems.

The new Core Ultra chips aren’t technically called 15th gen, but that’s essentially what they are. Even the flagship Ultra 9 285K doesn’t offer the generational uplift we hoped for, and the fact you’ll need to buy a new LGA 1851 motherboard to support one certainly doesn’t help, especially since AMD’s AM5 boards have become more affordable in recent times.