The only people that know the failure rates of AMD CPUs are AMD. Even then their data wont be complete because they will only get information of RMA'ed cpus. Meanwhile the failure rate of the 7000 series... pointed to a massive mess up on AMD's part. This after their issues with the RX 7900 xtx cooler.Reddit and YouTube are your reliable sources of data for cpu failure rates? Please look at this data and let us know what you think?
![]()
Intel's 11th Gen CPUs Had the Highest Failure Rates of All CPUs b/w 2019-21 | Hardware Times
Intel’s 11th Gen Core processors had the highest failure rate among all consumer CPUs between the years 2019 and 2021. This data was compiled by Puget Systems using the data collected over the last 3 years. The system builder used the following processor families to calculate the below...www.hardwaretimes.com

From Intel 11th gen was the only one. For AMD its every series.
SourceIntel's 11th Gen Core Rocket Lake is considered highly peculiar since their previous 10th Gen Core and Core X series, as well as Xeon W and Scalable CPUs, were extremely lower than their AMD comparable chips, by less than a single percentage. It is unknown the issues but is speculated that the cooling mechanisms for Rocket Lake CPUs were the culprit. Intel's new 12th Gen Core Alder Lake CPUs did not make the list due to how recently they were released into the market.
Source tomshardwareAMD CPUs in general had higher failure rates than Intel, but we did see an oddly high rate of failures with Intel's consumer-oriented 11th Gen processors… which seems odd, especially next to the very low rates shown by the preceeding 10th Gen.
However, the 11th generation (Rocket Lake) Core failure rates were considered an extreme oddity given that the 10th-Gen Core, Core X, and Xeon W/Scalable processors were well below their AMD counterparts (less than 1%). We don't know what the issue could be, although perhaps the high thermals of Rocket Lake processors were to blame.
Say we pick a random point in time. 2013. Source shows Intel more reliable than AMD.
2018“What this shows is that if you built an Intel/NVIDIA GeForce system yourself, based on past failure rates you have about a 1 in 7 chance of there being some sort of hardware problem. But if you purchase the exact same system from Puget Systems, this risk goes down to a 1 in 30 chance since we catch the majority of the hardware problems before you would even see the machine. Similarly, if you build an AMD/AMD Radeon system yourself, you have a a 1 in 5 chance of having a hardware problem versus a 1 in 27 chance if you purchase the exact same system from Puget Systems. In short, our data indicates that you are approximately 4-5 times more likely to encounter a hardware problem when building a computer yourself than when purchasing a complete computer from Puget Systems.” – Puget Systems
2016CPU (Processor)
While CPUs can (and do) fail, once they make it through our production process they are easily the most reliable components in our workstations. CPUs overall had a small overall failure rate of just .2% (1 in every 500), but what is really amazing is that in 2018 not a single CPU failed in the field for our customers. Another tidbit of information is that there was no appreciable difference between the Intel Core series and the Intel Xeon series of CPUs. Each only had a handful of CPU failures, all of which were caught by our production department.
We sell far more Intel CPUs than AMD (although that is starting to shift a bit with the latest Threadripper models), which means we don't have enough data to really dig into the reliability of AMD CPUs. From the data we do have, they look to be just as reliable as Intel, but we do not have a large enough sample size to be 100% confident in that conclusion.
Since there were no real trends showing one Intel CPU model as being better or worse than another in terms of reliability, we are simply going to give Intel processors, in general, our "Most Reliable CPU of 2018" award.
20152016 was a bit of a rocky year for CPUs in terms of failure rate. Last year, we only saw an overall failure rate of .33%, but this year it jumped up to .76%. This is actually still very good, just not as good as it was last year. We did not sell enough AMD CPU/APUs in 2016 for us to make a call on their reliability, but for Intel CPUs we can give numbers divided up between all Intel CPUs, Core i3/i5/i7, and Xeon E3/E5:
Intel CPUs Total Failure Rate Field Failure Only Overall .76% .28% Intel Core i3/i5/i7 1.0% .34% Intel Xeon E3/E5 .32% .16%
One interesting thing to point out is that we saw less than half the failure rate with Intel Xeon CPUs versus the Intel Core i3/i5/i7 CPUs. Due to the jump in Core i3/i5/i7 failures compared to last year, we are going to make the call that if you want the most reliable CPU, we recommend using a Xeon CPU if possible.
2011-20142015 was again an absolutely great year for CPUs in terms of failure rates. Note that in 2015 we did not sell enough AMD CPU/APUs for us to make a call on their reliability. For Intel, however, even though more and more technology is moving from motherboards to CPUs (memory controller, voltage regulator, etc.), the overall failure rate for Intel CPUs has not increased since last year. For 2015, we saw the failure rate of Intel CPUs to be:
Intel CPUs Failure Rate Overall .33% Intel Core i3/i5/i7 .38% Intel Xeon E3/E5 .2%
2014 was again an absolutely great year for CPUs in terms of failure rates. Even though more and more technology is moving from motherboards to CPUs (memory controller, voltage regulator, etc.), the overall failure rate for both Intel and AMD CPUs has actually been improving in recent years.
CPU Failure Rates 2011 2012 2013 2014 Total Failures 1.45% 0.94% 0.41% 0.27% Failures During Initial Testing (DOA) 0.39% 0.45% 0.19% 0.2%
As wee can see the 11th gen from Intel is not a part of the tread. The conclusion is AMD cpus have a higher failure rate using available data.
Last edited: