Intel overhauls certain Apollo Lake CPUs due to quality issues

Intel has found problems with one Pentium and three Celeron processors that cause certain signals to degrade faster than Intel wants. That is why Intel is introducing a new stepping for these processors, which solves the problems.

According to a Product Change Notification message, the processors are having issues with the low pin count, real time clock and SD card interfaces. These problems would result in certain signals degrading faster than Intel’s quality requirements allow after years of use. The new F1 stepping has ‘some silicon improvements’ and is 0.066mm higher than the previous B-1 stepping. The Product Change Notification has since been taken offline, but Google has backed it up.

The processors affected are the N3350, J3355 and J3455 in the Celeron series, and the Pentium N4200. Intel has been making new processors since late August; these have the letter E after the type name, for example N3350E. According to the Notification, all presumably business customers should be able to receive the refurbished processors by the end of February. After this date, the B-1 stepping processors are discontinued. These refurbished processors can also be found on an Intel support page.

It is not the first time that Intel chips have problems with the lpc. The Atom C2000 processors received a new stepping in the first half of 2017 due to a similar problem. Then the lpc clock output could stop functioning, resulting in a chip failure.

At the time, some manufacturers set up replacement programs for consumers who purchased products with the C2000. It is not yet known whether manufacturers will also do this for products with the Apollo Lake processors.