Intel has confirmed that it has paused shipments of some of its fourth-gen Xeon Sapphire Rapids processors due to a newly-discovered bug, and it hasn't set a specific date for shipments to resume. We received a tip that Intel had paused the shipments, and following up on the matter, we learned several details about the issue from Dylan Patel, Chief Analyst at SemiAnalysis, who says shipments have been paused for certain SKUs since mid-June. We also followed up with Intel on the matter, and the company issued the following statement to Tom's Hardware:
"We became aware of an issue on a subset of 4th Generation Intel Xeon Medium Core Count Processors (SPR-MCC) that could interrupt system operation under certain conditions and are actively investigating. This issue was not observed when running commercially available software, and other 4th Generation Intel Xeon processor SKUs (i.e., XCC and HBM) have not exhibited the issue. Out of an abundance of caution, we did temporarily pause some SPR MCC shipments while we gained confidence in the expected firmware mitigation and expect to release remaining shipments shortly." — Intel Spokesperson to Tom's Hardware.
In response to a follow-up question, Intel also told us that it doesn't expect the firmware mitigation to have an impact on performance.
