Intel Says Arrow Lake And 14th/13th Gen Mobile CPUs Are Immune To Voltage Instability Issue

Don't blame us for the awkward construction in the headline, because Intel has formally named the stability problem affecting its 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs: "Vmin Shift Instability Issue". Non-words aside, the issue is that the company's high-powered Raptor Lake desktop CPUs have issues with excess voltages that result in the premature degradation of the processors. Fortunately, this problem doesn't affect any of Intel's other chips.

That's according to Intel, anyway. That news comes from the chipmaker directly by way of a post on its product support forums titled "Intel Core 13/14th Gen Instability Update - Future Products Unaffected + Current Gen Product Updates". We'll post a screenshot of the meat of the post, but if you're in a hurry, the one-line summary is that neither Intel's extant mobile parts nor its next-generation CPUs (on mobile or desktop) will be fraught with this fault.


We wouldn't have expected Intel's next-generation parts to have this problem. They're based on different chip designs using new core architectures and separate fabrication processes. We're a little surprised (and pleasantly so) to hear that Intel's 13th- and 14th-generation mobile parts are not affected. Intel specifically calls out "HX-series processors"; this is reassuring, as those parts are absolutely based on desktop silicon.

Given that, it appears the mobile incarnation of those chips must use a different-enough voltage/frequency curve that they didn't end up having to deal with this flaw. Apparently the company's Xeon chips aren't affected either, even though there are Xeons using the same dice as the Core 13th- and 14th-generation chips. Once again, they likely use radically different VID tables from the consumer desktop parts, although it looks like the highest Xeon E processor, the Xeon E-2488, is basically a Core i5-13600K—which wouldn't be affected anyway.


Of course, if you're on a Core i7 or Core i9 processor from the 13th or 14th generation, you had better get the latest BIOS update for your motherboard and you may want to make sure that your board is enforcing the Intel Default Settings recommended power limits. You can find a chart above with those limits, but your motherboard likely has a setting somewhere to automatically fill in these values after recent BIOS updates.