After a year, Firefox finally stops crashing on Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs — Mozilla releases new version patch critical flaw on Intel 13th-gen and 14th-gen CPUs
Mozilla spent more than a year investigating widespread browser crashes on Intel 13th-gen and 14th-gen systems.
After a year, Firefox finally stops crashing on Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs — Mozilla releases new version patch critical flaw on Intel 13th-gen and 14th-gen CPUs | Tom's Hardware
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Raptor Lake CPU (Image credit: Intel)
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Mozilla has successfully addressed a critical bug related to Firefox that caused the web browser to crash on desktop systems powered by Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs. With the latest stable release of Firefox version 151.01, the company has managed to patch the issue that has been under investigation for more than a year.Mozilla engineers initially zeroed in on failures in a zlib-rs compression routine where certain dist values appeared incorrect, resulting in index out-of-bounds crashes. However, the root cause was tied to Intel’s Raptor Lake CPU instructions, specifically RPL050 and RPL060, which sometimes caused the CPU cores to read incorrect or outdated data.Senior Staff Engineer Gabriele Svelto first flagged the issue last year, blaming Intel for its CPU instabilities and highlighting mass browser crash reports coming from systems powered by Intel Raptor Lake, specifically in locations suffering from heat waves.Latest Videos From“If you have an Intel Raptor Lake system and you’re in the northern hemisphere, chances are that your machine is crashing more often because of the summer heat. I know because I can literally see which EU countries have been affected by heat waves by looking at the locales of Firefox crash reports coming from Raptor Lake systems,” said Svelto on Mastodon.He also noted that while Intel’s newer 0x12c microcode update significantly reduced the number of crashes, the bugs came back with the release of version 0x12F.
Intel’s Raptor Lake CPU instability issues first began surfacing in late 2022 before exploding the following year with users reporting widespread game crashes, browser instability, and system failures on 13th-gen and 14th-gen processors. Intel eventually confirmed after several months that the root cause was tied to a physical degradation issue caused by prolonged exposure to excessive voltage and heat. While the company rolled out several microcode patches, including 0x125, 0x129, 0x12B, and, more recently, 0x12F, these updates were only designed to mitigate the conditions triggering the degradation rather than reverse existing damage. Eventually, Intel announced an extended warranty for customers facing the issue from three to five years.If you have been facing Firefox crashes on your desktop PC running Intel’s 13th-gen or 14th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs, it is recommended to update the browser to its latest stable version by heading to the official page here.Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware NewsletterGet Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsFollow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
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Kunal KhullarNews ContributorKunal Khullar is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. He is a long time technology journalist and reviewer specializing in PC components and peripherals, and welcomes any and every question around building a PC.
17 Comments
Comment from the forums
So Intel releases a faulty CPU, but it's up to Mozilla to commit their resources to fix the issue. Great Job, Intel!
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I don't think the used market has devalued Raptor Lake CPUs due to degradation problems. I looked up 13700K and see it going for $300.
Also muddying the waters is that some 13th/14th gen are actually Alder Lake.
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garbilkee said:So Intel releases a faulty CPU, but it's up to Mozilla to commit their resources to fix the issue. Great Job, Intel!Lots of dev resources from probably thousands of software providers that were consumed investigating and in some cases patching the issue. The total fallout is hard to imagine and still ongoing today, though fortunately (and finally) largely mitigated.
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usertests said:I don't think the used market has devalued Raptor Lake CPUs due to degradation problems. I looked up 13700K and see it going for $300.
Also muddying the waters is that some 13th/14th gen are actually Alder Lake.Did Raptor Lake start going back up in price? I thought 13/14700K and 13/14900K were going for less? Maybe supply is dropping to the point that they are going back up in price. In fact, 14700K is hard to find on Amazon and surprisingly expensive elsewhere (~$400+), while 14900K is easier to find and maybe not a terrible value at mid-$400's depending on how you look at it (namely raw performance of course, lol).
Even if supply is short, which is probably is, it does make it seem like this issue isn't priced in. I'd much rather grab a 250K Plus or 270K Plus.
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DS426 said:Did Raptor Lake start going back up in price? I thought 13/14700K and 13/14900K were going for less?RPL has definitely gone back up. After getting my 270K Plus I joked to a friend about how much cheaper the 14700K must be now only to find out it cost more.
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This article is very misleading.
The evidence of it being related to widespread degradation is circumstantial at best. Claiming it as assumed fact is what is misleading.
You can read more specific information it is based on here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1950764Seem to be some error with the way Firefox software is having 8 bit registers compose 16 bit values on Raptor Lake and not any degradation. Maybe RPL CPUs are made wrong or the Firefox version's code is just made in an incompatible fashion, but they changed the way they did it in code and the CPUs magically "undegraded" and these unknown number of recent crashes evaporated. Could even be cumulative ram errors as RPL has a hard time running higher XMP in most motherboards (this wasn't a significant issue prior to DDR5) and the crashes don't seem to be reproduceable, just happen at a statistically higher rate with RPL.
That and it was originally an issue that amounted to about a dozen worldwide weekly crashes per the Firefox dev forum, and Gabriele is still looking to source degraded some CPUs to someday be able to effectively reproduce crashes for verification, so was not significant AFAIK.
Which, as a RPL user with Firefox as my secondary browser on My PCs for the last decade or so suspected because I've had 0 Firefox crashes on any of my 3 RPL PCs. And I'm using 151.01.131 right now.
It is good that they are paying such attention to the reliability of their software though.
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rluker5 said:Seem to be some error with the way Firefox software is having 8 bit registers compose 16 bit values on Raptor Lake and not any degradation.It's not an error in Firefox but also has no relation to CPU degradation.
It's way worse: an errata that those CPUs incorrectly execute some memory write instructions so the data in RAM becomes corrupted.
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setx said:It's not an error in Firefox but also has no relation to CPU degradation.
It's way worse: an errata that those CPUs incorrectly execute some memory write instructions so the data in RAM becomes corrupted.Not sure where you got that from since this is a rather isolated and correctable example, but wouldn't you get the exact same symptoms with unstable ram? Which if, on Raptor Lake, you enable an XMP profile of over 6400 on an average or lower 4 dimm board is not uncommon. And wouldn't that ram instability also be exacerbated by higher case temperatures in the summer, which the source from the previous Tom's article on this same topic stated as a correlation before the crashes basically went away?
How many people that only enable XMP stress test their ram? That used to be something you would just do if you started overclocking past XMP. I'm surprised there haven't been more complaints.
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I was curious specifically how they fixed it. I think this is it: https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D301917 It's a more surgical fix than I expected.
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rluker5 said:This article is very misleading.The article is fine. The confusion comes from your stubborn refusal to accept the Raptor Lake degradation.
rluker5 said:The evidence of it being related to widespread degradation is circumstantial at best. Claiming it as assumed fact is what is misleading.According to the Mozilla bug report you linked, all of the instances of this failure are coming f
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