In an interview with a major European PC parts retailer, a French publication discovered that Intel’s 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors have a return rate four times higher than that of the previous generation. At the same time, the 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh chips also have return rates thrice as high as the 12th Generation Alder Lake processors.
According to data from Les Numeriques, only 1% of AMD processors were returned in 2020, while Intel had a 1.75% return rate then. So, if AMD’s return rate remained stable since then, we can extrapolate that the Raptor Lake chips have a return rate of 4% to 7% while Raptor Lake Refresh processors would have 3% to 5.25%. We should also note that these numbers only reflect return rates that went through the retailer channels, not those that went straight to Intel.
Intel has recently been making rounds in the news with instability with Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh processors. While the company has announced a mid-August patch to address the crashing and instability problems, the software update won’t repair any chip that has already died or is dying. For example, one Intel Core i9-14900K chip refuses to work with Nvidia’s graphics drivers and crashes when some games are launched because it no longer has shader optimization.
According to the French news report, these are the chips affected by Intel’s latest problems: Intel Core i9-14900KF, Intel Core i9-14900KS, Intel Core i9-14900, Intel Core i7-14700KF, Intel Core i7-14700K, Intel Core i9-13900KF, Intel Core i9-13900KS, and Intel Core i9-13900K.
It is a massive blow to Intel, primarily if the chipmaker’s fix for the instability affects the processor’s performance. Furthermore, Intel must replace any chip that’s already been irreparably damaged, presumably all affected processors. Even if Intel had successfully fixed the issue, it would have eroded the years of trust it had built among consumers, with some institutions reportedly jumping to AMD’s Ryzen 9000 CPUs.
Nevertheless, AMD has been having some issues on its side as well. The launch of the Ryzen 9000 chips, which was supposed to be at the end of July, was pushed back a couple of weeks due to an unspecified issue. While it doesn’t seem as significant as what Intel is experiencing right now, it has got to be severe enough to warrant a delay. However, it could also be something that AMD is doing out of caution, as the news of a few defective brand-new AMD Ryzen 9000 CPUs will surely blow up and could even cause more damage than a short delay.