Man I sure hope not. The fact that it doesn’t say they are alongside this announcement does make me feel a little better about it given how generally happy they’ve been to announce all their cost-saving measures lately.

I assume you’re at least partially joking, but being able to make it work for a single tower (if the performance is good and it’s not just marketing) is a bit of genuine engineering innovation

For most applications I assume you want to leverage AV1 hardware encoding to use it, and I imagine it would be the same for AV2 etc. We might’ve been a bit spoilt by H.264 being literally >20 years old at this point (and even VP9 and H.265 being >10 years old).

This was absolutely not on my bingo card

This was absolutely not on my bingo card

Beijing claims its homegrown AI processors now match H20 and RTX Pro 6000D

So do they? Last I heard (which was not that recently) they were still notably behind in performance and I’m surprised if they were able to catch up that quickly?

The TH article doesn’t really discuss the performance claim.

This just makes me think of 3D printing to customize aesthetics, which in hindsight should’ve been obvious 🤔

Like the other commenter, my local situation is also being able to buy at roughly MSRP without excessive difficulty. It will vary by region of course, but if you haven’t checked stock levels recently it might be worth another look?

In what has to be the luckiest case of a mislabeled auction item ever

…yeeeah okay if you say so lol

Is peripherals being on the 2.4 GHz band actually a problem though? (I’m saying this without knowing the answer)

Like, I don’t recall ever personally witnessing a 2.4 GHz wireless mouse not working properly “because of interference” etc.

Well, yeah I guess. But let’s say you were on AM4 with Ryzen 3000/5000 and were looking forward to jumping up to Ryzen 9000 at release specifically because the jump to 7000 wasn’t “big enough” to justify doing it. Suddenly with Ryzen 9000 it ended up being barely more of an upgrade for you than Ryzen 7000, which would make it still not really worthwhile. Upgrade perspectives don’t have to be just a single gen!

The initial pricing was bad:

Of course, performance is just one part of the equation. Pricing is equally important, and at launch, the 9700X was priced at $360, while the 9600X came in at $280. Meanwhile, comparable Zen 4 models like the 7700 cost just $290 and included a cooler, while the Ryzen 5 7600 was only $180 and also came with a box cooler – something neither the 9600X nor the 9700X offered.

And prior to launch, expectations were set wrong:

Released in late 2024, we were all excited for AMD’s latest offering – their next step on AM5 – and everything coming out of the company leading up to the release sounded promising. We were expecting double-digit performance gains for games thanks to a 16% IPC increase over Zen 4. Sadly, this isn’t what we got.

If expectations were managed better and launch pricing made sense, reviews would probably have been mildly positive, highlighting the power consumption difference that you’ve noted instead of focusing on those two problems (lower-than-expected performance and nonsensical pricing).

Perceptions are heavily colored by how things are at launch, even though today the situation is modestly improved due to the pricing changes.

The headline is a bit sensationalized, but it’s the closest-to-the-original source that I found (the original being in German).

The original article’s bit translated from German with DeepL (which is similar to what’s in the WCCF tech article):

Both AMD Ryzen and Intel Core can offer extremely long battery life in notebooks while accessing the entire x86 ecosystem. Ultimately, there is no advantage for Arm in the overall package.

So it’s not really a blanket statement, but a contextual one.

tl;dr:

In terms of gaming performance, Zen 5 still offers very little over Zen 4, especially for the non-X3D V-Cache models. We called Zen 5 a flop in our day-one review, and we completely stand by that.

We’ve finally reached a point where buying Zen 5 makes sense financially, but it’s still far from an exciting upgrade.

Hm, I guess for me the pain I’ve had with motherboard SATA connectors has more to do with there not being enough space to navigate my hands in the case than the connector’s direction. Having them connect parallel to the board has the (perhaps minor) advantage of keeping them out of the way of Super Long™ graphics cards or any other PCIe cards.

Do you mean “flat” as in facing parallel to the motherboard?

https://www.techpowerup.com/340059/softbank-group-and-intel-corporation-sign-usd-2b-investment-agreement

They’re buying $2 billion in Intel shares

Just in time to get replaced by a 5080 Super!

I was wondering about the tradeoffs between fan height and just having extra heatsink there with slightly thinner fans, but at 151mm 80mm, even the 25mm thickness isn’t that big of a deal I guess lol

Ah. That might explain it: https://subscribe.arcade.tomshardware.com/uk/tom-s-hardware-digital-subscription/dp/8e30f1e8

This includes – among other things – a replacement for Anandtech’s freely available benchmark databases, except you have to pay for it 🫠

The report actually paints Tan in a pretty favorable light if you’re in both the “hope Intel turns it around instead of selling out for shareholder value” and “Intel should keep its own manufacturing” camps.

Tan’s effort to raise several billion dollars through Wall Street banks to strengthen Intel’s finances and invest in production capacity were pushed back by the board. A potential purchase of an AI accelerator developer — aimed at narrowing the gap with Nvidia and AMD — has also been slowed by lengthy board debate, allowing another tech company to move toward acquiring the target instead, the report claims without elaborating.

There was a post I read about a year ago (SubStack link) – I think I found it through Ian Cutress? – which discussed the author’s thoughts on the board at the time. He wasn’t thrilled with the composition:

The board is pretty horrific. Most of the people have no technical expertise, and many of the people most at fault for getting Intel to where it is, are still on the board.

The current rift just makes me even more curious about how much direction has changed and is changing under Tan vs Gelsinger. Until now it was a bit of a question mark how pro-fabs Tan was, but now it looks like he’s pretty firmly in the pro-fabs camp - and maybe just less optimistic (or more pragmatic?) about the situation compared to Gelsinger.