HardOCP

> They're much faster. 50-60% on the single core stuff and 300% faster on multi-core tests. [citation needed] 50-60% is absurdly large for single core, the reality is 20%, and 300% is crazy. The T480 uses a 15W quad core on the same 14nm process as the 15W chip in the T470 and because it's slightly more power efficient there's a little gain, about 25-30%. So the difference between the Sandy Bridge T420 to Kaby Lake Refresh T480 is perhaps 50% in multi core. Here's my favorite Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake IPC benchmark collection: https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs_sandy_br…

HardOCP liked them at one point: https://m.hardocp.com/article/2011/09/08/gaming_killer_nic/2 I always thought of them as purveyors of snake oil and reached for Intel NICs with great results every time. I used to like Atheros for radios back in the good old bad days of WEP and MadWifi.

If you're interested in Linux-specific benchmarks, https://phoronix.com/ has some, and in general http://anandtech.com and http://www.hardocp.com .

From what I've read 840 Pro beats it and uses half the power: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/12/10/samsung_840_pro_ssd_review/1… "The Samsung 840 Pro is a revolutionary SSD in terms of steady state performance, beating out the competition easily in our trace based testing. The low latency and high sequential speeds are among the best we have recorded. The power consumption figures prove that this SSD would be just as much at home in the latest Ultrabook as in an overclocked gaming rig."

I am aware AMD has been making great strides lately, but you have to remember that AMD has a decade-long hole to dig themselves out of. The only game in town has been Intel for almost 12 years now. When the Core lineup was released in 2006 [1], the wind quickly went out of AMD's sails. [2] AMD had almost matched Intel in market share, they just need to keep the innovation coming. The problem was Bulldozer and similar architectures just weren't competitive. Even with double the core count, Intel's chips were simply better for the vast majority of workloads. [3] The CPU wars had gotten so one-sided that I believe Intel stopped pushing. With the exception of Gulftown [4], four cores was the name of the game from Kentsfield in 2006 [5] until Kaby Lake in 2017 [6]. Intel released it's first desktop dual-core processor on April 16, 2005 [7]. Quad-core Intel chips came January 8, 2007 [8]. Less than two years led to an extra two cores in the consumer level CPU market, and that was the end for over 10 years. When the Zen architecture was release to consumers on Febuary 28, 2017 [9], Intel checked under the couch and magically found two extra cores. Coffee Lake was released on October 5, 2017 [10]. Funny how real competition changed a decade of stagnation, isn't it? If Zen didn't do as well as it did, I can see the 8th generation chips staying quad-core. The supercomputer market is also dominated by Intel. I count two (2) supercomputers using Opterons [11]. Everything else is…

Backstory I found, I wasn't familiar with this story (2001). https://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_cheating_rade… TLDR: ATI did the same thing with Quake 3 Arena which was commonly used as a benchmark game for testing new video cards of that era and which many game news sites were using.

It was a huge dick move from the beginning. Requiring Partners to make their gaming brands Nvidia exclusive way obviously intended to hurt AMD. Maybe they got a serious call from the FTC about anticompetitive practices. Also see: https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/03/08/geforce_partner_program_imp…

I don’t think this was all about money. Raja had been trying to run Radeon Technologies Group like an independent company and pushing for separation from AMD for a while. HardOCP did a good piece on this -> https://hardocp.com/article/2016/05/27/from_ati_to_amd_back_journey_in… I think the recent Intel + AMD custom chip was probably the last thing Raja did before he got pulled RTG got the reins put back on and now he’s hoping ship to peruse what he’s wanted all along. To work with more independence.

IPC gains per generation are vanishingly tiny, if they exist at all. Skylake -> Kaby Lake, for example, had no IPC improvements at all. A very small clock bump to the various tiers was it. Even if you look over a large generation gap there's only a ~20% IPC improvement going from an i7-2600K to an i7-7700K ( https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs_sandy_br… ) 6 years & a shrink from 32nm to 14nm and all it can muster is +20%. Cores are just not getting faster by any meaningful amount.

it's more like 20-25% (depending on what you use it for) https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs_sandy_br…

1080: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/05/17/nvidia_geforce_gtx_1080_foun… 1070: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/06/06/nvidia_geforce_gtx_1070_foun… Other benchmarks: http://www.trustedreviews.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-review-performan…

http://m.hardocp.com/news/2010/03/19/apple_bans_game_after_dev_disses_… You can find other examples if you look. I remember there being a big kerfluffle about it ~2 years ago or so.

It's already happened. Many here probably remember the ATI "Quake/Quack" debacle where the ATI driver was changing the rendering pipeline based on the binary name: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_cheating_radeo…

They are just getting rid of stock before NVMe M.2 SSD's go mainstream with 10x performance and lower production costs compared to AHCI SATA3 SSD's. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/24/where_ssd_market_headed_in_2…

Skyrim and Fallout 3 are in my eyes counter-examples for using an SSD, since you basically have only the two loading times and afterwards it's streaming. Maybe if the Quicktravel takes too long on the HDD. > If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it? Oh, sure then :) It is only a waste in the relation of price per gigabyte vs. the possible performance improvement ingame. > You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless. See http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/12/10/hdd_vs_ssd_real_world_gaming… if you want another source.

Bare in mind that the Titan is not the fastest GPU, the 290x and the 780ti are. And they're decent at 4K: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/11/11/geforce_gtx_780_ti_vs_radeon…

Reminds me of how some old ATI graphics drivers detect whether you were running Quake 3, and turn down the graphics quality for the sake of better benchmarks. Renaming quake3.exe to quack3.exe would fool the detectors and skip these "optimizations".[1] [1] http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_cheating_radeo…

It's so sad to see this kind of stuff. It's not like the Galaxy S4 is a slow device. It reminds me of Nokia used a fake video [1] to sell the Lumia 920, which was supposed to have a pretty good camera. It just ends up being an unfortunate distraction that causes people to mistrust you. Ars is right that this isn't new. I remember ATI being caught in the Quake/Quack thing [2] a dozen years ago. [1] - http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/5/3294545/nokias-pureview-ads-are-fraud… [2] - http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_cheating_radeo…

Watch the video (http://hardocp.com/article/2011/09/13/amd_bulldozer_fx_model_8150_cpu_… at about 9:15, 10:25, and 10:55 (approximately). They show close-ups of CPUZ.

A video of the overclocking for those who are interested: http://hardocp.com/article/2011/09/13/amd_bulldozer_fx_model_8150_cpu_…

Have a look here: http://hardocp.com/news/2010/03/07/intel_comment_on_fake_cpu_debacle_r… That makes the newegg spin definitely less believable.

https://www.hardocp.com/article/2019/01/07/battlefield_v_nvidia_ray_tr… Battlefield V Ultra 1080p RTX on is ~63 FPS average (not minimum FPS, but average), which means it will regularly dip below 60 in practice. > Also last I read, RTX really isn't designed for offline raytracing and doesn't really bring much to the table. Its use is in realtime. On the contrary! RTX Cores are a hardware-accelerated BVH-traversal. That has HUGE implications for the offline rendering scene. See NVidia Optix for details: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/nvidia-optix-ray-tracing-powered-rtx/ IMO, this is the killer-feature of RTX. Accelerating those Hollywood Renders from hours-per-frame to minutes-per-frame. NVidia Optix takes industry-standard scene trees and can use the RTX Cores to traverse them for hardware-accelerated raytracing. Or more specifically: coarse AABB Bounds checking, which is a very compute & memory heavy portion of the Raytracing algorithm. Even if RTX is too slow for video games, any improvement to offline rendering is a huge advantage.

This program goes beyond branding efforts, according to the report[1] the partner program includes: - high-effort engineering engagements - early tech engagement - launch partner status - game bundling - sales rebate programs - social media and PR support - marketing reports - Marketing Development Funds (MDF) Conditionally including MDF as part of this program is behavior similar to what caused the government action against Intel by the FTC: "The FTC settlement applies to Central Processing Units, Graphics Processing Units and chipsets and prohibits Intel from using threats, bundled prices, or other offers to exclude or hamper competition or otherwise unreasonably inhibit the sale of competitive CPUs or GPUs. The settlement also prohibits Intel from deceiving computer manufacturers about the performance of non-Intel CPUs or GPUs."[2] 1: https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/03/08/geforce_partner_program_imp… 2: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2010/08/ftc-settles-cha…

> adding the possibility to turn it off should suffice. How could Intel/AMD reasonably communicate this to customers and have it taken at face value? "Here's a flag to disable this black box we ship in every CPU. The product design and source code are proprietary, so please take our word for it that this flag disables everything." There was a blackhat talk on embedding malware in SMM and triggering it with a magic number written to a register to escalate the process privileges. [0] So there will always be suspicion of special triggers to re-enable the black box that you turned "off" I think there is a very slim chance that Intel and AMD can regain credibility when it concerns the IME/PSP. Especially after it emerged Intel created a special ME disabled mode intended for US agency customers. [1] [0] https://youtu.be/lR0nh-TdpVg [1] https://m.hardocp.com/news/2017/08/30/how_to_disable_intel_me_courtesy…

Rather than a supercapacitor, the Crucial M500 uses a small array of capacitors: All of the M500 line includes hardware AES 256-bit encryption, and Micron showed us an array of small capacitors on one of the M.2 form factor drives that supported flushing of all data to the NAND in the event of a power loss--not a super capacitor as seen in enterprise class SSDs, but there's no RAM cache to flush so it's just an extra precaution to ensure all of the data writes complete. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6614/microncrucial-announces-m500-ssd-li… Other features that set the M500 apart also center on optimizations that are clearly holdovers from the enterprise version of the SSD. Power hold-up is provided by a small row of capacitors that will flush all data in transit to the NAND in the event of a power loss. This feature is not standard with any other consumer SSD on the market, and in enterprise SSDs power capacitors typically command a much higher price structure. Finding power loss protection on the consumer M500 is a nice surprise, and one that users will need more often than they think. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/05/28/crucial_m500_480gb_ssd_revie…

To add to that: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/75827-am… https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/08/10/amd_ryzen_threadripper_1950… http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3015-amd-threadripper-1950x-1920x… http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-1950x-threadripper-… http://www.techradar.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-threadripper-1950x http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/108628-amd-ryzen-threadripper-1950x-… https://www.vortez.net/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_threadripper_1950x_rev… google translate of computerbase.de: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u… google translate of pgh.de: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&pr… google translate of tomshardware.de: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&pr… google translate of hardwareluxx.de:…