After temporarily halting shipments of some of its Sapphire Rapids CPUs, Intel is now closing the leak that led to it.

Two weeks ago, Intel had to stop shipping some of its fourth-generation Xeon chips. This particularly affected the versions with mean core count, with eight to 32 cores on board. Intel found that these CPUs caused system crashes in some cases.

The manufacturer has now announced that the problems have been fixed. Deliveries resumed after Intel worked out a patch in the firmware. Anyone who already owns servers with such a processor can look forward to this patch.

Vagueness is king

It is still unclear what the exact impact of the bug was and specifically how it was triggered. Intel does not share these details. The fact that a processor starts with some rough edges that need to be corrected via firmware is not in itself such a big exception. The delivery of the chips is to be stopped. This seems to illustrate that when Intel discovered the bug, it wasn’t very confident that it could solve the problem with software.

Sapphire Rapids is not a flawless success story for Intel. The market launch of the latest generation of Xeon processors was delayed by around two years, allowing AMD to take a clear lead with its Epyc chips.