Intel’s 1.13GHz CPU Recalled – Is Intel resorting to desperate measures?

There are a handful of people whose opinion highly respect in this community of ours, among those is Kyle Bennett of HardOCP.  I had the opportunity of meeting Kyle for the first time in person at this year’s Computex 2000 in Taipei and gained an instant respect for his ability to tell the truth, regardless of the circumstances.  As simple as that may be, you’d be surprised how often such a simple trait is absent from people these days. 

In any case, Kyle apparently had very similar problems with his 1.13GHz Pentium III sample and instead of writing a judgment on Intel’s production process, simply reserved to refrain from publishing any sort of review until he could get a reliable part.  After seeing that Tom had problems with his sample, Kyle came forward and mentioned that he had similar problems. 

Both Tom and Kyle included me on a CC of their email conversation regarding their experiences with the 1.13GHz Pentium III, so I decided to contact both of them.  I presented to both Tom and Kyle the facts that I saw, basically our 1.13GHz sample worked flawlessly in the tests we ran and I found it very odd that two Intel production samples failed in the hands of two individuals whose testing methods have always seemed to be sound. 

I offered Tom my working 1.13GHz sample so that he may get some benchmarks and complete a review of the processor.  After declining, I made the same offer to Kyle who accepted.  Kyle then contacted Tom and mentioned that he’d like to get a hold of Tom’s CPU which also failed most of the tests and demonstrate this in front of an Intel engineer. 

Armed with our 1.13GHz sample, Tom’s sample and Kyle’s sample, the Intel engineer and Kyle went at it.

You can visit Kyle’s description of what tests each CPU failed, but the basic conclusion was that our 1.13GHz sample ran through all of the tests perfectly, with one exception.  Tom provided Kyle with a hard drive formatted with Tom’s standard Linux test suite, which included a Kernel compilation test that Tom normally runs in order to test the stability of overclocked processors.  According to Tom, all normally clocked CPUs he has benchmarked have passed this test flawlessly, while most overclocked CPUs fail. 

It was on this test that all three chips failed, a test that has never failed on a normally clocked CPU but has failed on overclocked processors.  Why would a normally clocked CPU fail a test that only overclocked CPUs would fail?

There is a fine line between “overclocking” and what AMD/Intel do to increase the yields on their CPUs, but as long as they work, increasing the core voltage of a CPU in order to hit a higher clock speed is fine.  Overclockers do it on a daily basis and run their systems harder than a lot of your average home users with very few problems. 

It seems like this time around Intel may have pushed a little too far, since only two of the processors that made it out as review samples seemed to fail horribly, however it wouldn’t be surprising if most of the review samples failed the Linux kernel compilation test.  The fact that the three processors, ours, Kyle’s and Tom’s all failed the Linux kernel compilation test, a test that is failed normally by processors with poor margins, seems to indicate that maybe Intel was taking a bigger risk than they should’ve with releasing a 1.13GHz Pentium III.  Is clock speed really that important?