Powerful but poorly optimized, the Broadwells show weakness

Sep 29, 2015 14:22 GMT  ·  By

The recent launch of the new Office 2016 seems to be causing some major issues with the following Broadwell CPUs, the i5-5675C, the i7-5775C and i7-5700HQ.

Apparently, the very niche and neglected Broadwell generation of CPUs from Intel seems to have some crippling issues with the new Office suite from Microsoft. According to Redditor 1oxosc3les, his rather new Core i5-5675C got his newly bought workstation to BSOD every time he booted the Office 2016 app receiving the "Machine_Check_Exception" error.

According to him, after doing a couple of tests to see where this error originated from, there was no apparent sign that might give him a hint on what piece was malfunctioning. Afterwards, he started updating every possible driver to the newest version, and he still couldn't find the source of the problem. Nevertheless, every time Office 2016 was booted, his machine BSODed. After not managing to solve the problem, 1oxosc3les reverted to Office 2013 and obviously the program worked fine.

Incomplete development shows the limits of today's Broadwells

After thinking, at first, that it was something to do with Office 2016, it didn't take him long to realize that the issue is related to his CPU. Multiple posts on Intel, Microsoft and Kernel forums indicate that the same issue occurs even if you are not working on a Microsoft OS, and is rather related to a Broadwell CPU design fault.

The bug appears to users running on Windows 7, 8.1, 10, multiple Linux versions and even crashing a machine that was running a Linux virtual box. Most dedicated motherboards manufacturers like Gigabyte, ASUS, ASRock, and MSI are also affected.

According to some forum members, the Machine_Check_Exception error occurs in various circumstances and disabling the Intel SpeedStep might help, but it wouldn't eradicate the crashes completely. Ironically, what fixed the crash was a complete CPU replacement. Reverting back to his old Haswell, 1oxosc3les eliminated any Office 2016 issues.

It seems that a single person claimed to have fixed this problem, and he did it by clean reinstalling his Iris Pro graphics driver. Overall, this shows how poorly Intel has taken care of the Broadwells during their limited development cycle while focusing on mobiles and then rushing back to PCs to launch the new Intel flagship, the "Skylake."