Intel Sapphire Rapids MCC shipments have been resumed
Intel has temporarily suspended shipments of its Xeon Sapphire Rapids CPUs after discovering a bug. The company has now confirmed that sales and shipments have been resumed.
According to earlier reports, a subset of Xeon Sapphire Rapids CPUs with MCC (Medium Core Count) dies was showing an issue that has not been discovered before. The company has paused shipments ‘out of an abundance of caution’ in case the company finds no easy fix to the problem and would require a new silicon revision. The good news is that the firmware fix that was being tested has now been verified to work and resolves this issue.
Intel has confirmed to Tom’s Hardware that the company is confident that this mitigation addresses the issue and the firmware update is now available to customers:
Last week, we informed you of an issue on a subset of 4th Generation Intel Xeon Medium Core Count Processors (SPR-MCC) that could interrupt system operation under certain conditions. Out of an abundance of caution, we temporarily paused some SPR-MCC shipments while we thoroughly evaluated a firmware mitigation. We are now confident the firmware mitigation addresses the issue. We have resumed shipping all versions of SPR-MCC and are working with customers to deploy the firmware as needed.
— Intel
This was not the first time Intel has experienced problems with Sapphire Rapids, though. The architecture was delayed by more than 2 years due to various bugs that were discovered during development, and it has essentially pushed the release date from planned 2021 to early 2023. In August 2022, it was revealed that Intel had already 12 steppings of Sapphire Rapids.
Source: Tom’s Hardware