Oops somehow Rockstar went bankrupt even though they GTA5 printed money for them. But luckily there’s this new investor, which totally isn’t the old owner wearing a fake mustache, who is willing to take a risk and take over the project and SOME of its personnel.

Tax the fucking rich!

I still have my original 7" EEE PC somewhere in storage (batteries removed). It was the 900mhz model which I imported from Asia. That little thing was so cool, with a little utility I could undervolt and downclock it to 700mhz. That way the fan would never run and the battery time was very long. I absolutely loved that little machine.

They had been operating on the same premise for a long time. Use dirty tactics along side with superior tech to heavily punish the competition. Then coast along for as long as possible, maximizing profits and doing little else. Rinse and repeat.

However this hinges on them getting the superior tech at the right moment, just as the competition is surging again after years of Intel coasting. This backfired in the past when Prescott had a new 90nm process that had way more leakage than expected. This raised the amount of energy the chip required to operate, which in turn raised the heat. This limited the clockspeed, which made them slow and energy hungry. Desktops were slow and noisy and laptops were impossible due to the power requirements. And the Netburst architecture they had needed high clockspeeds which also wasn’t possible. It failed hard and allowed AMD to surge with their Athlon64 chips absolutely destroying anything Intel had at that time. Intel needed to go back to their P6 design (pre-netburst), which had been kept alive in the company for their Pentium M series.

It backfired again recently when Intel failed to make the expected jumps in process node. The chip design was perfectly fine, but pretty ordinary as compared to AMDs lineup. Especially on the high end AMD had more performance on the table. As the new process node failed and AMD had TSMC make their high end chips, AMD took the lead once again. This failure was compounded by a large scale production error where oxidation of one of the internal cpu layers wasn’t caught by QA. This made a small (but significant) percentage of chips fail after a few years. Intel figured out a workaround where changing some of the power regulation allowed for the oxidation to not occur or get worse. But chips that already failed or were about to, still failed. This led to consumers being annoyed and weary of buying Intel again and enterprise customers forcing Intel to replace a lot of chips at no costs.

Another big part is the whole GPU thing, where Intel has had integrated GPUs for a long time, but no dedicated product. The performance, compatibility and features were poor, basically enough to connect a monitor for office work but not much more. They even released a couple of products with AMD integrated GPUs, combined with Intel cpus because their on-board graphics were so poor. They tried to fix this multiple times, but failed each time. Recently with their Arcmage and later Battlemage products they are finally in a position to sell products. But the performance is still poor and compatibility is hampering them quite a bit. Even when selling them at a loss, it’s hard to be competitive. And then when the AI boom hit, they were left out in the cold. Nvidia won that race, selling so many chips for AI. AMD did significantly worse, but still good as compared to Intel. Intel has been selling some AI products, but it’s nothing compared to the others.

Then there’s the whole ARM thing. People have been saying for years one could build pretty good chips with them. In the past companies like Qualcomm and Mediatek said as much, but weren’t taken seriously. Then Samsung made their own and also said as much. Again they weren’t taken seriously, they are good chips for phones and perhaps tablets, but for serious computing you need more power. Sure the performance per watt is good, but no way that scales right. But someone at Apple was listening after getting frustrated with Intel. They had moved from IBM to Intel in the past without much trouble. So they invested, designed some chips and blew people away with their results. Enough for Microsoft for example to also try again with Arm chips, having failed miserably with the software in the past. This might hurt Intel a lot in the future, as they were often the preferred supplier when it came to running Windows.

So yeah a lot of things going on, there’s also some shady financial stuff involved and more tech stuff. It’s an interesting, complicated and unfolding story. Like so many things today, we have no idea how the future will be in regards to Intel.

Not to be that guy, but that’s 100% on you for not having backups of important work. It’s 3 years and your fucking research dissertation, how the fuck do you keep that all in one place?

This time you got fucked by Microsoft for having shit software. But it could have been your hardware that exploded, your house catching fire, your shit being stolen, you downloading malware from that one site you told your girlfriend you’d never visit again, shitty infrastructure causing power issues or flooding, you yourself having a nervous breakdown and nuking the thing.

Keep everything important at least in three places, one of which should be in a physically different (remote) place. Backup often, keep to the schedule and test your backups.

Jeez man, using Microsoft software and not having backups is like walking around with a loaded gun pointed at your dick. It’s all well and good till you get your dick blown off.