Although AMD Ryzen CPUs are fairly decent in terms of performance and bang for your buck, even they can crumble under intensive workload. This is what Torbjörn Granlund, author of the GMP open-source library which offers "arithmetic without limitations", found out in these past few months while running extensive tests.
Apparently, the GMP author has "fried" two Ryzen 9950X CPUs in the past few months, one in February, and the other in August. While Granlund admits that the hardware setup wasn"t ideal, it does seem like the CPUs got overworked while running intensive GMP tests. In both cases, the author observed discoloration covering around 25mm² on the pin side, also noting that the CPUs were running under maximum workload when they gave out.
Granlund says that the ambient room temperature was fairly low at 20°C (68°F), and he suspects that the compute-intensive MULX instruction running in a loop could be blamed too. It is important to note that none of the CPUs died suddenly, instead, they failed after months of high workload, which indicates that there was a gradual degradation until failure. Interestingly, the author"s AMD Ryzen 7750X runs the same same load and is built with a similar configuration, but it seems to be running quite stable for a "long time" now.
In a statement to The Register, AMD confirmed that it is looking into these reports and have reached out to Granlund to get more information to aid their investigation process. AMD recently told media outlets that reports of AM5 socket burnouts are likely due to manufacturers not complying with the recommended specifications, but in this case, the company has not highlighted this as a potential cause. Seeing that GMP is a very compute-intensive library and the author was running maximum workloads on the AMD Ryzen CPU for months, it is unlikely that other customers with regular workloads will experience the same failure. That said, it is still good that AMD is investigating the matter out of abundance of caution.