Intel Apollo Lake CPUs May Die Sooner Than Expected

mood · Sep 10, 2019

Intel Apollo Lake CPUs May Die Sooner Than Expected
September 9, 2019
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-apollo-lake-refresh-degradation-cpu-failure,40362.html

As detailed in a recent Product Change Notification (PCN) document, Intel is refreshing four of the company's Celeron and Pentium Apollo Lake processors due to degradation concerns.

For those of you that want to skip the mumbo-jumbo, Intel is basically saying there are reliability issues with its Apollo Lake processors where the 14nm chips are likely to die before the warranty is up. Having identified the problems, Intel is proceeding to refresh the entire Apollo Lake lineup.
Current Apollo Lake chips with the B1 stepping are moving over to the new F1 stepping.

Intel is urging its customers to transition existing affected products to the new stepping as soon as possible. To simplify the transition and avoid confusion between the new and old stepping, Intel adding the "E" suffix to the processor names. As a result, the processors with the F1 stepping will be marketed as Celeron J3455E, J3355E, N3350E and Pentium N4200E. If you're shopping and come by one of affected Apollo Lake SKUs, make sure the processor have the "E" suffix.
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mood · Sep 12, 2019

Intel retracts Apollo Lake warning, discounts claims of reliability issues
September 12, 2019
https://www.techrepublic.com/articl...rning-discounts-claims-of-reliability-issues/

The Silvermont bug—otherwise referred to as the Atom C2000 bug—resurfaced on Monday as Tom's Hardware reported on an Intel Product Change Notification (PCN) indicating that Intel was refreshing the Apollo Lake Celeron N3350, J3355, J3455, and Pentium N4200 processors due to issues similar to those in Silvermont.

This resulted in concern from owners of Synology NAS devices, as current Synology systems utilize Apollo Lake processors, and the company was among the hardest hit with the Silvermont bug, prompting a 1-year warranty extension for affected units.

The issue, as described in Intel's now-retracted PCN: [...]
The original PCN "had inaccurate information," according to an Intel spokesperson, who noted that a revised version has now been published.
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Update: In a statement, Synology "confirmed with the chipset vendor [Intel] that all of the related product designs conform to the vendor's latest design guidelines (July, 2019). Meanwhile, Synology has not observed any abnormal error rates since the initial release of the related products."
Update 2: Intel provided this statement to TechRepublic:
Intel originally published a specification update in July 2017 outlining mitigations for Errata APL47 to avoid signal degradations under certain conditions in the outer years of use. When the B-1 Stepping is used in accordance to the published specifications and design guidelines, it meets PC Client Usage requirements. With the F-1 Stepping, the mitigations mentioned in Errata APL47 are no longer required to meet PC Client Usage requirements.

Further, Intel noted that the errata information indicates the issue was fixed in firmware. It's unclear what performance impact this update would have on the affected low-power processors.
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Intel Apollo Lake CPUs May Die Sooner Than Expected

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Intel Apollo Lake CPUs May Die Sooner Than Expected

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