A fatal hardware error has occurred, AMD Northbridge WHEA-Logger Event ID 20

[gkline]

My HP laptop had a typical windows update that required a reboot. I did this. Everything seemed fine. At night, I put my laptop to sleep with a tap of the power button, then wake it with another tap of the power button in the morning. Waking from sleep is always rather quick. But I started to notice that my laptop had shut down completely overnight. Plugged in, no power problem. Since it happened more than once, I decided to check the Event Log for System:

A fatal hardware error has occurred

Component: AMD Northbridge
Error Source: Machine Check Exception
Error Type: HyperTransport Watchdog Timeout Error
Processor APIC ID: 0
Event ID: 20
Source: WHEA-Logger

I wasn't able to find out much about this error, only that others encountered this with random reboots while the system was up and running. My case is thankfully not that severe. But it had me wondering if there's some kind of hardware issue?

I decided to roll back to a restore point made a week prior. This processed OK. I checked my Event Log for System and didn't see any new entry for this fatal error. Is it possible that some kind of unexpected glitch happened in the last update? I'm wondering if I should try it again manually, or if I should wait for Windows to do an automatic Update later on.

UPDATE: I let the system hibernate and then woke it up again a few hours later. Event Viewer doesn't show that fatal hardware error. I'm going to proceed with the update again and see if it returns.