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
