Supermicro gave us same type of assistance. Then new feature of bifurcation did not work correctly. Without it, enterprise telecommunications peripheral that costs 10x more than 4 socket Xeon motherboard can't run at nominal speed, and it was ran on real lines, not test data.

They sent us custom BIOSes until it got stabilized and said they'll put the patch in the following BIOS releases.

The thing is neither Intel nor AMD nor Supermicro can test edge cases at max usage in niche environments without paying money, but they would really love to claim with backup they can be integrated for such solutions. If Intel wants to test stuff in space for free they have to cooperate with NASA; the alternative is in-house launch.

When you’re not only helping them debug their own hardware but are also spending money on their ridiculously overpriced HEDT platform, it probably makes them want to keep you happy.

Intel has been struggling with CPU performance for a decade, and has been trying to regain their position in absolute performance and performance/{price,watt} comparisons. I think that means they’re being less conservative than they used to be on the hardware margins and also that their teams are likely demoralized, too.

Possibly. I would start swapping parts around at that point. Different memory, different CPU, or different motherboard. Just 1 more anecdote, but my r7-7700x has been a dream (won the silicon lottery). It runs at the maximum undervolt & RAM at 6000 with no stability problems.

Intel is already running their CPUs at the red line. We're seeing the margin breaking down as Intel tries to remain competitive. The latest 14900KS can even pull > 400W. It's utter insanity.

At least the built in “multicore enhancement” type overclocks that are popular nowadays with motherboard manufacturers.

I wonder if the old style “bump it up and memtest” type overclocking would catch this. Actually, what is the good testing tool nowadays? Does memtest check AVX frequencies?

But isn't overclocking the entire point of buying the K version of these chips?

Why is this downvoted? That's exactly what's happening here. The affected devices are being overclocked, and the instructions at the end of the linked support document detail how to find the correct limits for your CPU and set them in your BIOS.

Remember that you run a lot of untrusted code on your single-user desktop through Javascript on websites. Javascript can do all those side channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown.

turbo boost is an advertised feature of the chip

these chips that have been specially binned because they are supposedly stable at those frequencies (within an envelope set by intel)

if intel can't get it to work they shouldn't be selling these chips at all

Provided enough cooling, a chip that can boost to its turbo frequency for a few seconds should also run stably at that frequency indefinitely. Nowadays these boost clocks are so high that there is often not much gained by pushing any further.

> The hyperthread and c-state stuff, eh, if you want to run code that might be a virus you will have to limit your system.

So, you are trusting all web pages you view? Because these are unknown code running on your box which probably has some beefy private data.

Intel should police their own ecosystem.

Temperatures like that have been fairly normal for a few generations now - both for Intel and AMD. It might look insane compared to what you were used to seeing a decade ago, but it's actually not that crazy.

First, the temperature sensors got a lot better. Previously you only had one sensor per core/cpu, and it was placed wherever there was space - nowadays it'll have dozens of sensors placed in the most likely hotspots. A decade ago a 70C temp meant that some parts of the CPU were closer to 90C, whereas nowadays a 90C temp means the hottest part is actually 90C.

Second, the better sensors allow more accurate tuning. While 100C might be totally fine, 120C is probably already going to cause serious damage. The problem here is that you can't just rely on a somewhat-distant sensor to always be a constant 20C below the peak value: it's also going to be lagging a bit. It might take a tenth of a second for that temp spike in the hotspot to reach the sensor, but in the time between the spike starting and the temp at the sensor raising enough to trigger a downthrottle you could've already caused serious damage. A decade ago that meant leaving some margin for safety, but these days they can just keep going right up to the limit.

It's also why overclocking simply isn't really a "thing" anymore. Previous CPUs had plenty of safety margin left for risk-takers to exploit, modern CPUs use up all that margin by automatically overclocking until it hits either a temperature limit or a power draw limit.

> On the other hand IMO operating a CPU at 90-100C is just insane.

No it isn't, the manufacturer literally says it's normal! I think people who spend as much money on cooling setups as the chip are the insane ones.

My favorite story: I once put Linux on a big machine that had been running windows, and discovered dmesg was full of thermal throttling alerts. Turns out, the heatsink was not in contact with the CPU die because it had a nub that needed to occupy the same space as a little capacitor.

I'd been using that machine to play X-plane for over two years, and I never noticed. It was not meaningfully slower: the throttling events would only happen every ten or so seconds. I'm still using it today, although with the heatsink fixed :)

I have a garage machine with a ca. 2014 Haswell that's been running full tilt at 90C+ for a good bit of its life. It just won't die.

the amount of cooling you get is proportional to the difference of component temperature to ambient temperature. thats why modern chips are engineered to run much hotter.

For both Intel/AMD 100C is now a target, not a limit.

Hey, is there a cooling solution that sprays water on some sort of heat spreader and lets it evaporate? Kidding. Kinda. But actually, is that possible?

It's particularly bad when they stop telling you what clock speeds are achievable with more than one core active. At best these days you get a "base clock" spec that's very slow that doesn't correspond to any operating mode that occurs in real life. You used to get a table of x GHz for y active cores, but then the core counts got too large and the limits got fuzzier.

And laptops have another layer of bullshit, because the theoretical boost clocks the chip is capable of will in practice be limited by the power delivery and cooling provided by that specific machine, and the OEMs never tell you what those limits are. So they'll happily take an extra $200 for another 100MHz that you'll never see for more than a few milliseconds while a different model with a slower-on-paper CPU with better cooling can easily be more than 20% faster.

Dynamic switching power (i.e. the fraction of the chip's power consumption from actually switching transistors, as opposed to just "being on") scales with V^2 * f, where V=voltage and f=frequency, and V in turn depends on f, where higher frequencies need higher voltage. Not really linearly (It's Complicated(tm)), but it's not a terrible first-order approximation, which makes the dynamic switching power have a roughly cubic dependency on frequency.

Therefore, 1.1x the frequency at the high end (where switching power dominates) is 1.33x the power draw.

Those final few hundred MHz really hurt. Conversely, that's also why you see "Eco" power profiles with a major reduction in power draw that cost you maybe 5-10% of your peak performance.

Even if GP's cooling setup was less than ideal, the chip should have throttled itself to a stable frequency instead of crashing left and right.

For different reasons though. AMD's chiplets produce heat in a small area which makes it hard to transfer heat quickly. Intel just use a shitload more power and thus more heat.

Ooh, thank you! I looked so long at the Oodle section and skimmed other sections as well (even searched for the `oodleintel.htm` link in their source codes), but somehow missed that...

Granny, Iggy and Miles are all discontinued as stand-alone products. We're still providing support to existing customers but not selling any new licenses.