>Were those accusations against Intel rumors and hearsay?
It's not a binary "good/bad" CPU issue. Not all RPL CPUs are bad, but some. The rumormongering is about how much is "some." One bloke gets on reddit and says MY CPU BLOWS UP! and it gets magnified manifold.
13th-gen CPUs have been around for two years. 14th-gen is almost a year. Both have a track record. You can peruse on public forums like reddit to see how many "bad CPU" are reported.
https://google.com/search?&q=raptor+lake+instability+report+reddit
From cursory manual scan, there's a lot of teeth-gnashing and anxiety, and rightfully so, but precious few actual reports of "bad CPUs." The rational conclusion to draw is that "some" equates to a small percentage.
My gauge is that 13900K/14900K are most at risk, within that small percentage. 13700K/14700K are substantially less so, and 13600K/14600K's risk is even smaller still.
Reddit is a valid metric, because its population are by and large regular consumers, which mirrors people here. If you were a server shop with intensive 24/7 use, then you'd use a more rigorous test method.
Second, there's a distinction between people with existing RPLs, and people thinking of buying RPLs. Assuming that the fix is conclusive--and there is no reason to think that Intel is lying--then people buying RPLs now, and immediately applying the microcode fix, would have zero risk.
>The real question is why should we trust that there won't be other issues should have been caught and fixed before release?
Both AMD and Intel have a long track record of making CPUs. Their track records show that all CPUs can have issue post-release--to wit, AMD's Sinkclose vulnerability--and the vast majority of those issues can be fixed or mitigated with a microcode patch. The Intel RPL degradation--more correctly, accelerated degradation, as all CPUs degrade over time--is an outlier. The possibility of something like it to happen again is infinitesimally small.
Now, you can say, well, no matter how small the possibility is, I just don't trust Intel anymore, and I won't buy any of its CPUs from now till forever. This is known as cutting off your nose to spite your case, because your future CPU options are then cut by half. People who think like this are fanboys and idiots.