September 1, 2025
Earlier this year, reports emerged of Asrock motherboards paired with processors such as the 9800X3D suffering catastrophic failures. AMD responded by suggesting the root cause was likely noncompliance by certain motherboard manufacturers with AMD’s official BIOS recommendations, specifically the application of excessively high voltages to the CPU.
While those issues have largely been addressed through BIOS updates provided by Asrock, a new case has now drawn attention. Torbjörn Granlund, the principal developer of the well-known open-source GMP library, reported that he has destroyed two Ryzen 9950X processors in the past several months during his development work.
Granlund’s GMP library provides arbitrary-precision arithmetic and is known for pushing CPUs to their computational limits. In February 2025, one of his 9950X chips failed, and by August a second had burned out under similar conditions.
Both failures presented the same symptoms: localized scorching around the CPU pins, with damaged areas measuring roughly 25 square millimeters. The burnouts occurred exclusively under sustained full-load operation, suggesting that continuous, intensive workloads played a role.
Granlund noted that ambient temperature at the time of failure was only 20°C, making thermal environment an unlikely factor. He suspects that the culprit may be the repeated execution of compute-heavy MULX instructions. Interestingly, the CPUs did not crash immediately, but rather degraded over time under prolonged stress before failing completely.
To underscore the anomaly, Granlund tested the same workload and MULX instructions on a Ryzen 7750X under nearly identical hardware conditions. That chip has remained stable over long periods, showing no signs of similar degradation, suggesting the flaw may be unique to AMD’s Ryzen 9000 series.
AMD has since acknowledged Granlund’s report and confirmed that it has reached out to him for further technical details to aid in its investigation. At present, AMD has not identified a root cause and does not consider excessive BIOS voltage a likely factor in this case.
For the vast majority of everyday users and gamers, this issue is unlikely to pose a threat. The GMP library is a highly specialized computational tool designed to sustain CPUs at nearly 100% utilization for extended durations. Granlund himself typically runs workloads continuously for up to a month at a time — a scenario far removed from typical consumer usage.
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