Memes

FANcy

Just got this card as an upgrade to my 5700xt. It is so good, and REALLY pretty.

Most of the time, the product itself comes out of engineering just fine and then it gets torn up and/or ruined by the business side of the company. That said, sometimes people do make mistakes - in my mind, it’s more of how they’re handled by the company (oftentimes poorly). One of the products my team worked on a few years ago was one that required us to spin up our own ASIC. We spun one up (in the neighborhood of ~20-30 million dollars USD), and a few months later, found a critical flaw in it. So we spun up a second ASIC, again spending $20-30M, and when we were nearly going to release the product, we discovered a bad flaw in the new ASIC. The products worked for the most part, but of course not always, as the bug would sometimes get hit. My company did the right thing and never released the product, though.

Capitalism: "Make as much as possible as fast as possible"

It's not easy to make shit that doesn't work if you care about what you're doing. I bet there's angry debates between engineers and business majors behind many of these enshitifications.

Though, for these Intel ones, they might have been less angry and more "are you sure these risks are worth taking?" because they probably felt like they had to push them to the extreme to compete. The angry conversations probably happened 5-10 years ago before AMD brought the pressure when Intel was happy to assume they had no competition and didn't have to improve things that much to keep making a killing. At this point, it's just a scramble to make up for those decisions and catch up. Which their recent massive layoffs won't help with.

I'm still staying with my 5950X. So many cores!

Also on the 7800X3D. I think I switched at just the right time. I've been on Intel since the Athlon XP. The next buy would have been 13/14th gen.

Intel has not halted sales or clawed back any inventory. It will not do a recall, period. The company is not currently commenting on whether or how it might extend its warranty.

But isn't the fix basically under clocking those CPU?

Meaning the "solution" (not even out yet) is crippling those units before the flaw cripples them?

For years, Intel's compiler, math library MKL and their profiler, VTune, really only worked well with their own CPUs. There was in fact code that decreased performance if it detected a non-Intel CPU in place:

https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49&v=f

That later became part of a larger lawsuit, but since Intel is not discriminating against AMD directly, but rather against all other non-Intel CPUs, the result of the lawsuit was underwhelming. In fact, it's still a problem today:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/302650-how-to-bypass-matlab-cripple-amd-ryzen-threadripper-cpus

https://medium.com/codex/fixing-intel-compilers-unfair-cpu-dispatcher-part-1-2-4a4a367c8919

Given that the MKL is a widely used library, people also indirectly suffer from this if they buy an AMD CPU and utilize software that links against that library.

As someone working in low-level optimization, that was/is a shitty situation. I still bought an AMD CPU after the latest fiasco a couple of weeks ago.

Honestly even with gpus now too. I was forced to team green for a few years because they were so far behind. Now though, unless you absolutely need a 4090 for some reason, you can get basically the same performance from and, for 70% of the cost