Today, processors are a high-value piece of hardware that also have their impressive cutting-edge technology and ruggedness as their main asset. It is very rare to find problems in a CPU, but as we well know, its structural and electronic performance is reduced as in any printed circuit. Therefore, Intel wants to go further in terms of aging detection and will launch a feature called: Scanning in the field. How will this work?
There is no electronic system, piece of silicon, or system that is unaffected by silicon degradation. From the moment the voltage runs through its lines and its transistors, this degradation occurs irremediably because the oxygen we consume ages us. Unlike us living beings, a CPU does not show such aging, so far…
Intel In-Field Scan, a new feature for CPU
Intel wants to detect and show this aging problem with a new function that unfortunately will not arrive for processors already on sale. We don’t know exactly how it will be implemented and how this detection will be done, but we do know that it will be a hardware function that will run various tests (not specified at this time) at the circuit level internal processor in its cores.
These tests will determine if there are any hardware problems that the parity or ECC checks do not indicate. With this, we understand that there will be several key points to cover, such as IMC, cores or iGPU (the latter if it reaches the Mainstream range) and the report will be quite brief in the results.
Intel named it as Field analysis or IFS (not to be confused with its foundry services) and will first reach Sapphire Rapids CPUs focused on a sector as specific as online service providers or HyperScale systems.
A kernel for Linux first
Everything seems to be done at the software level after the hardware changes. The operating system kernel must interpret what a driver embeds as firmware as if it were separate microcode from that of the processor itself.
This seems complex because it shows the need for the software to adapt to each series or generation of processors, and it will. The driver (to define it together in a way, firmware for the most purists) will allow various options, such as testing all cores or a specific one, after which a report will be generated with the data of said tests.
With this system, administrators will be able to clearly know which core is failing due to aging or degradation, which ones are good or just a resulting problem, such as higher latency in instruction execution, voltage sags, frequency drops or longer cache access times.
We don’t know if this will eventually happen to desktop processors with Raptor Lake, for example, it might not even be necessary, but it’s definitely a big plus for Team Blue from a troubleshooting standpoint. Sapphire Rapids will be the first architecture to feature In-Field Scan and will hit the market shortly, after which we can get a better idea of what it offers.
