As Europe faces soaring summer temperatures, a surprising method has emerged to track these extreme heatwaves: the crashing of Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs. A developer from Firefox at Mozilla, Gabriele Svelto, noted that high ambient temperatures are causing fourth-gen Intel processors to fail more frequently due to their known timing and voltage issues.

“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,” Svelto mentioned.

The implications here are significant; the rising heat appears to exacerbate the existing reliability problems of these processors. Svelto pointed out that the issues have become so prevalent that a report-generating bot had to be disabled, given the volume of crashes reported from affected systems.

Despite previous microcode patch updates, the fundamental problems remain unaddressed, leading to questions about whether manufacturing adjustments could remedy them. As summer heat soars, the struggles of Intel’s CPUs remind us of their fragile balance between performance and reliability in extreme conditions.