Intel: Microsoft not wrong to deny taking any blame for Windows "unsupported CPU" BSODs

It's fair to say that Intel processor owners have had a busy time keeping up with recent bugs and issues. The 7th Gen (Kaby Lake), all the way up to the 11th Gen (Rocket Lake) chips are susceptible to a new GDS vulnerability dubbed "Downfall". The issue has thankfully been mitigated with an Intel microcode update (MCU), and Microsoft also erased the way to remove the mitigation that was possible via a registry tweak.

That's not to say AMD users are completely unaffected by bugs as there was a recent Zenbleed vulnerability found on these chips and the company shared upcoming firmware patch details.

And while the newest 12th Gen and 13th Gen CPUs users need not deal with the Downfall bug, 13th Gen Raptor Lake (RPL) owners have been experiencing a blue screen of death (BSOD) error code that says "UNSUPPORTED_PROCESSOR" even though it is clearly not the case. Although many consequently believed this was an issue caused by a particular set of Windows 11 and 10 KB updates as the bug was triggered by these updates, Microsoft came out in its defense to suggest the issue was elsewhere, somewhere on the hardware side.

Today, Intel has published a support article about the issue confirming that Microsoft was right as the problem was due to a recent buggy microcode update, though it did not go into detail explaining what actually triggered this problem. In the article, Intel explains:

Summary

Intel is aware of reports from end users of blue-screen hangs with error code “Unsupported Processor” when updating to August 2023 preview Updates for Microsoft Windows® 10 and Windows 11* while using the latest BIOS updates from system manufacturers on affected processors.

Description

• Intel is aware of reports from end users of blue-screen hangs with error code “Unsupported Processor” when updating to August 2023 preview Updates for Microsoft* Windows* 10 and Windows 11 while using the latest BIOS updates from system manufacturers on affected processors.
• Intel has identified an issue in recent microcode updates to system manufacturers which can cause this error code.
• The following processors are impacted by this issue:

Patched firmware is already upon us as MSI is the first motherboard vendor to release updated BIOS. Meanwhile, others like Asus or Gigabyte haven't released their firmware with the updated MCU yet.

Source