The bankruptcy vultures would get very fat.

Let's say for a second that they have, they finally figured out they were the problem and solved it with a microcode update that stopped the chip from using too much power and cooking itself.

They still aren't replacing affected models except if they fail during warranty, so they have destroyed their used value. And you can't count on the existing chips not to have degraded sufficiently that they will fail shortly out of warranty, so now people who bought two generations of Intel CPU not only can't trust their own PC, but they also can't feel smug about it so they won't be going free advertising for Intel at least until they replace it.

When you add to that the fact that AMD now has the fastest CPU in every class... Investors have to be wondering whether they need to pull out now before it gets worse.

There were some reports of a manufacturing defect causing oxidation in the CPUs. I didn't follow that too closely, but that wouldn't be fixable. Also any hardware degradation caused by running at excessive voltages would also be permanent. A patch might be able to to keep the CPU from running at settings that would cause further problems, but the hardware is already permanently crippled at that point.

They're not pushing their newest CPUs anywhere near as hard so it shouldn't be an issue going forward.

Their full explanation on what was happening sounds legitimate. Basically an algorithm was dumping too much voltage to idled CPU cores in very specific scenarios. The explanation in latest microcode fix sounds plausible that it would prevent this from happening in the future. Any chips fried from this happening already aren't repairable, though, Intel will replace them under warranty that they just extended for another year.

Zen 5: pretty damn good.

AMD seems to be fine on energy efficiency too: [1]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/p... [cpubenchmark.net]

[1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html

Basically, the truth is that the recent era of Intel chips that were known for being so much more efficient than the corresponding AMD offerings only managed to accomplish that by fudging benchmarks and sabotaging the their official compiler used for all Windows software - a fact they were sued for in court and lost, twice . Despite this, Intel fanboys have been loyally astroturfing over those facts for decades, so it hasn't been common knowledge amongst consumers. For Linux users, who by and large never use

AMD CPUs are currently more energy efficient than Intel CPUs. Intel has been slipping badly across the board - efficiency has dropped for the last few generations.