A law firm is inviting owners of 13th and 14th Gen Intel Raptor Lake CPUs to join in on an upcoming class action lawsuit.

The case is being taken up by Abington Cole + Ellery, which says it is "investigating a potential class action lawsuit" over alleged defects in Intel's latest Raptor Lake desktop CPUs. At this stage, the firm seems to only be collecting reports from owners of 13th and 14th Gen chips.

According to Intel, a contributing factor to ongoing "instability" issues with Raptor Lake comes down to a microcode algorithm that applies too much voltage to the CPU. Chipzilla says it's working on a new version of the processor family's microcode with more conservative voltage, and says that it should arrive in the middle of the month.

The CPU titan somewhat undersells what excessive voltage does to a chip. While more voltage can enable more stable operation at higher clock speeds, at a certain point more voltage can actually cause silicon to degrade. The consequences of voltage degradation range from crashing at frequencies that were previously unproblematic to chip death; if you've ever heard about how dangerous overclocking can be, this is why.

As for why Raptor Lake has this issue at all, it might have something to do with the high out-of-the-box clock speeds that Intel sets for its desktop CPUs. The 6 GHz boost clock on the Core i9-14900K is much higher than the brief 5.7 GHz that AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X hits only every now and then. The Core i9-14900KS can even do 6.2 GHz on two cores.

It's not clear how many people might be eligible for the lawsuit, which would presumably include users that have Raptor Lake CPUs that are either partially damaged (which can be mitigated by lowering the clock speed) or completely toast. One game developer claims failure is practically guaranteed with enough time, citing its own issues with Chipzilla's desktop processors.

There has been plenty of time for the silicon to fail. 13th Gen Raptor Lake debuted in late 2022, nearly two years ago.

While it was initially thought that only the higher-end unlocked or K models in the 13th and 14th Gen product stacks could break, Intel appeared to concede last week that any model in the two product ranges with a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 65 watts or more might have the underlying problem. That list includes almost every single Raptor Lake CPU on the desktop, so we can assume there are more than enough affected users for a class action lawsuit to go forward.

Although Intel reportedly told The Verge it won't be recalling any CPUs, it does ask owners to contact customer support, implying that they could perhaps request a replacement. That may help stave off a class action suit from Abington or otherwise.

If this did go to court and the result went against Intel, though, damages might not amount much. AMD had to cough up $12 million over whether its Bulldozer CPUs actually had as many cores as advertised, and the payout for each individual was only about $35. Not many people even owned a Bulldozer processor in the first place; Raptor Lake has likely sold far more by now.

The Register asked both Intel and Abington Cole + Ellery to comment. The latter declined to comment. ®

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https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/01/intel_raptor_lake_lawsuit/