221–230 of 484 posts
It's insane to me that Intel just can't figure out what to do vs AMD. They continually position themselves as the premium choice and price their products accordingly even though that isn't true any more.
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> Microsoft ignoring AMD in their latest Surface lineup is a hint for the people looking for answers I think the entire new surface line-up is a giant conspiracy. The Surface Pro 9 5G has a Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3 with some tweaks called the SQ3. It does not match the performance of 12 Gen intel in a 15w power envelope, which is important because the Surface Pro 9 non-5G (intel) uses an i5-1235u, a 15w chip. But the last…
People need to remember that desktop/laptop ARMs outside of Apple have kind of royally sucked... E.g. when the first Surface Pro ARM was released (the X, 2020ish), it was ridiculously more expensive, less performing and had less battery life (!) than the cheaper Intel options https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Pro-X-Review... The previous Surface non-Pro ARM attempts (RT, 2012ish) were even crappier (Teg…
I've got an SQ1 and Apple M2 and they're both truly excellent.
(disclaimer: I worked years in engineering in both Qualcomm and Apple)
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That was a long time ago. AMD has shipped iGPUs/integrated platforms and dGPUs with fully mainlined drivers for ages now. Only recently has Intel gained credibility with Iris iGPUs beating AMD's, whereas for the longest time you had to pair Intel platforms with Nvidia GPUs to get any kind of graphics performance, spelling trouble due to Nvidia's insistence on closed drivers and binary blobs.
Back when I was not on Mac, I always preferred laptops with Intel integrated graphics, regardless of performance. It was just better drivers, less battery drain and boards didn't fail either. My first laptop had NVIDIA graphics, and it was whole combination of bad drivers and motherboard frying because of overheating. Things have probably changed, but I'd just get one with Intel graphics -- just because I trust Intel…
GPUs of the era your thinking of had high failure rates from issues with lead free solder, though the Nvidia GPUs on Macs and Laptops would outright fail from other issues, requiring a full chip replacement.
https://eclecticlight.co/2015/12/20/lead-free-graphics-cards...
Reports elsewhere ( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/repor... ) suggest that the layoffs might be a bit concentrated in the Sales & Marketing departments. Is it just me, or do some other folks also smell "corporate bloat, which better management would not have allowed to happen"?
Tangential, but what are the consequences of upcoming layoffs cutting across the industry and impacting mostly these "soft" non-technical roles? Will this create a large disgruntled segment enough to start upheaval the like of the French or the October revolution?
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> Who bought a laptop because it had an Intel CPU? If you're a Linux user, Intel integrated graphics have always been the most compatible and most well-supported option.
Was this marketing to Linux perverts worth all this money that Intel poured? For the vast majority of normies, Intel Inside was useless noise.
On an unrelated note, "perverts" doesn't seem to me like a particularly kind appellation.
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Yes, sales are at the front of the pipeline. If there aren’t prospects and customers to talk to, salespeople sit idle. If you’re at a company and you look at your engineer to sales ratio you might think to yourself “gee, we have so many sales people!” That’s because there’s not much multiplying factor to sales roles. There isn’t a lot of potential to automate like engineers can do. A salesperson only has so many hour…
There is indeed a lot you can do to avoid overcrowded sales departments, e.g. define minimum order volumes your prospects need to hit to let your salespeople interact with them (and refer them to an external reseller otherwise). Invest in online sales tools like product configurators to let you customer do the sales job etc.
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Tangential, but what are the consequences of upcoming layoffs cutting across the industry and impacting mostly these "soft" non-technical roles? Will this create a large disgruntled segment enough to start upheaval the like of the French or the October revolution?
That kind of doomer prediction would be more interesting if we did not live in time period with historically high employment rates.
People will believe any statistic that aligns with their mindset.
Unemployment rates are at historical lows within a small margin, it's been 50 years since unemployment has been lower (i.e. something like 60% of Americans have not seen lower unemployment in their whole lives), and since the WWII war economy that they've been significantly lower (i.e. almost nobody alive).
Is the 15% sales "tumble" because people and companies are holding on to their PCs for a longer time? This could be good news for the environment.