Intel CPUs are crashing again during summer heatwaves, Firefox dev warns

Europe’s summer heatwave may be highlighting Intel’s “Raptor Lake” bug in a different way: users may have not paid attention on how to patch it, and their systems are crashing as a result.

Gabriele Svelto, an engineer for Mozilla, posted that he could essentially geolocate crash reports (which identify the processor, presumably) and tie them to areas which have suffered from a recent European heat wave.

“If you have an Intel Raptor Lake system and you’re in the northern hemisphere, chances are that your machine is crashing more often because of the summer heat,” Svelto wrote on Mastodon. “I know because I can literally see which EU countries have been affected by heat waves by looking at the locales of Firefox crash reports coming from Raptor Lake systems.”

“Raptor Lake systems have known timing/voltage issues that get worse with temperature,” Svelto added. “Things are so bad at this time that we had to disable a bot that was filing crash reports automatically because it was almost only finding crashes from people with affected systems.”

On the Mozilla bug tracker, one engineer wrote: “Suhaib deployed a change to bugbot that makes it ignore crashes from this CPU so hopefully we won’t get so many going forward.”

A fix is available

Intel’s “Raptor Lake” bug affected processors during 2024, specifically Intel’s 13th-gen and 14th-gen desktop Core chips — not those found in laptops. Flawed microcode allowed the desktop chips to run at elevated operating voltages, which could cause the systems to crash.

The problem, Intel eventually found, was that after an affected chip had crashed, the degradation was irreversible. Last August, Intel extended its warranty on affected processors from three to five years to help alleviate the problem.

From June 23 to July 2, Europe suffered its worst heat wave ever, with temperatures climbing to over 104 in countries like Spain, Portugal and France. Europe doesn’t have nearly the prevalence of air conditioning that North American companies do, which means that European enthusiasts were already dealing with ambient temperatures far higher than normal, then tacking on the heat from their CPU and GPU as well.

Although there is no remedy for the Raptor Lake bug, it can be mitigated. Intel recommended that users download an updated UEFI/BIOS from their motherboard manufacturer, which would place tighter constraints on the processor to avoid overheating.

It’s unknown whether those crashes were in fact unpatched Raptor Lake systems, but Svento’s analysis was probably a good guess. Apply those patches now!