Intel’s “0x129” Microcode Mitigates 14th Gen & 13th Gen CPU Instability Issues, Benchmarks Reveal No Performance Downgrades

Intel's new microcode to mitigate the 14th Gen & 13th Gen CPU instability problems is finally out, & the first set of "credible" benchmarks reveals a ray of hope.

Intel Might Have Done The Job With Its New Microcode Patch, Now Being Offered By Both ASUS & MSI To Resolve 14th & 13th Gen Instability Issues

It looks like Team Blue decided to solve the instability issue earlier than expected. Industry sources said we could have a new microcode drop by mid-August. Still, Intel agreed to be one step ahead, providing motherboard manufacturers with the new "0x129" microcode in the first week of August. ASUS and MSI became the first firms to offer the new microcode patch in their BIOS update, and fortunately, JayzTwoCents managed to benchmark 14th Gen CPUs with the new microcode, giving us a detailed look at how the performance has changed.

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So, JayzTwoCents decided to compare the new "0x129" microcode on an ASUS motherboard against the previous "0x123" microcode which is an older firmware versus the "0x125" which addressed the eTVB bug. The "0x123" patch was released in May and brought in "Intel's Baseline" settings. This was done to see how far Intel has come in terms of the optimizations brought in with the set of microcodes within the May-August timeline. JayzTwoCents tested the new "0x129" patch on Intel's Core i9-14900K CPU, which constitutes a majority portion of the "unstable CPUs" out there.

Starting with the benchmarks, the microcode was tested on Cinebench R23, and the multi-threaded results obtained show that the performance hasn't taken much of a hit when compared to the 0x123 microcode; however, with single-core, there's a slight uplift, going up from 2,336 points to 2,345 points.

There was a noticeable drop in performance when the chips were compared at Cinebench 2024 multi-threaded benchmarks, dropping from 2,136 to 2,124. The results were