“Vmin Shift Instability” is the root cause behind the instability, crashing, and other serious issues that owners of affected 13th and 14th Gen “Raptor Lake” processors have been wrestling with for what is apparently many months now, according to new comments that Thomas Hannaford, an Intel spokesperson, has provided to an outlet. The comments from Hannaford came over a week after Intel shared an update on Raptor Lake instability, detailing four scenarios that could lead to Vmin shift, as well as mitigations that include an 0x12B microcode update. A list of CPUs that could be affected and are eligible for Intel’s warranty extension can be found below.
“Yes, we’re confirming this is the cause and that it is fixed,” Intel spokesperson Thomas Hannaford tells The Verge. So, what is Vmin Shift Instability? The short version is that Intel’s chips and their paired motherboards were asking for too much voltage. That voltage was damaging parts of these chips, prematurely aging them.