Abington Cole + Ellery, a law firm specializing in class actions and intellectual property, has begun investigating the crashing and instability issues plaguing Intel's 13th- and 14th-Generation Core 'Raptor Lake' processors, with the potential of filing a class action lawsuit on behalf of Intel's customers.
Intel announced about a week ago that some 13th- and 14th-Generation Core processors can become unstable due to elevated voltages, which a patch due in mid-August should fix. The company promised to respect all RMAs, so all damaged CPUs should be replaced. The issue doesn't just impact the higher-end models — Intel says the instability bug also impacts mainstream 65W CPUs.
Intel sells its mainstream 65W CPUs in tens of millions of units quantities, so it could be an expensive replacement cycle for Intel if the company honors all replacement requests. This is where things start to get interesting for class action lawyers, who are now trying to determine whether Intel is filling all RMA claims.
"Tom's Hardware says 'Intel has pledged to grant RMAs to all impacted customers,' [but] are there any reports that Intel is not actually doing that," asked a lawyer from Abington Cole + Ellery in a Reddit post. "Warranty cases where the manufacturer is honoring the warranty rightly get tossed out of court with ridiculous speed."
An Intel customer responded that Intel had honored its RMA. All the owner of an affected CPU had to do was take pictures of the CPU and send them to the company. Once the company is satisfied with the pictures, they contact the owner for credit card information and ship a new CPU before receiving the defective unit. Once the owner gets the new processor, they have to send the bad CPU to Intel, and once the company receives it, it will reverse the charge on the credit card. There is a $25 fee for this advance RMA process, but the company also offered the option to send in the defective CPU first and then get the new one later.
For now, it seems Intel is taking care of faulty CPUs without problems. Still, there will inevitably be unhappy customers, and it looks like class action lawyers are prepping to launch a lawsuit against the company if they find enough plaintiffs. If they do and win the case, the judge could order Intel to pay compensation to virtually all owners of Intel's 13th- and 14th-generation Core processors. That's when class action lawyers get their cut — a huge one — so it isn't surprising to see the firm begin an investigation.
