AMD Ryzen Chips Fail Due To Intermittent Crashes That Are Hard To Debug

The 14.3 percent jump in share prices of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) this week following the announcement that its Radeon Vega Graphics card will be used by Apple in its newest iMac Pro is in danger of being wiped out. The risk comes from reports that its Ryzen chips are having problems because of potential segment faults with the new Ryzen processor.

Comments from semiconductor professionals and gamers in industry forums cite the intermittent crashes experienced by the Ryzen chips that are hard to debug, Benzinga reports. Dan Nenni, an analyst of Detwiler Fenton, wrote on Wednesday that the issues are affecting Linux distributions such as CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. High-end gaming firms using Linux are being targeted by AMD to try the Ryzen chips before the firm reaches to Windows.

By testing the Ryzen chips on Linux users, AMD will be able to identify potential performance problems among users with demanding workloads. Nenni points out that the types of bugs that Ryzen chips users have experienced are quite common when a hardware is in the development phase. However, in the case of the Ryzen chips, the bug problems persist in spite of BIOS upgrades.

Because a software revision could create a fix, AMD asked its Ryzen chip customers not to open new tickets related to the problem. Nenni warns that in a worst-case scenario, it would take up to half a year to complete an expensive chip re-spin.

Meanwhile, PCWorld reports that AMD did not reduce the prices of its Ryzen chips in anticipation of the launch of its Threadripper CPU. In a statement, AMD stresses that the prices of its Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 CPUs did not change. If there are price cuts, it could just be an individual store sale.

However, some tech websites report that the Ryzen 7 chip costs $499, but the 1700X and 1700 are now selling for $399 and $329, respectively. Besides the reported price cuts, AMD will release in July the Ryzen 3 series for mainstream customers, Naples server processors, and RX Vega gaming card.