It's indeed not a happy thing to see Ars publishing this. In the old days of Jon Stokes CPU articles what AMD did would get never ending streams of articles.

Considering what AMD went through, I indulge in a bit of AMD fanboyism at times, I try to avoid it. Some articles compare the latest Intel releases with AMD, and they often end up saying "ok Intel still has a 10% perf lead in half the tests, but .. twice the price". Am I the only one to consider what AMD did a miracle ? is it Intel friend network turning this into a "meh" ?

I have bought intel for the last 15-20 years, however my next workstation/gaming computer will have a threadripper of some sort.

I have never been a fanboy of either but for my use case it's a nobrainer right now. Even if I was a fanboy I'd have a hard time justifying getting an intel chip.

I thought so too. But when I looked into typical software engineering workloads, I found that i9-7900x soundly beats the 16-core Threadripper in nearly all compiling/linking/running tests workloads because of the 20% per-core advantage. It also ended up being cheaper because x299 motherboards cost less.

I don't have desktops, I'm waiting to see their laptop CPUs.

I'm commenting on these things right now because I still didn't buy a laptop and need one soon/now.

There's no ryzen based laptop atm (regional limits might apply).

One Asus gaming laptop that is basically a desktop that you can carry around, with effort, and that has no battery life to speak of. Not available here.

Two Lenovo laptops (Thinkpad A series and Ideapad), both seem restricted in terms of CPU (aka not the 2700), don't come with the latest GPU or memory (single channel or unknown or limited to 8 GB). None of these is available.

The HP x360. Fancy, limited to 8 GB as it seems. Also doesn't come with the latest APU (only announced for 2500U). Not available yet.

The Acer Swift 3. Limited to 8 GB as far as I can tell. Aaaand not available.

Bottom line: You cannot get a laptop with either the mobile chips or the monster gaming thing now. They exist somewhere, but not here. Most of the announced devices have crippling limitations (memory) and are - for me, someone who deeply sympathizes with AMD - basically DOA. Which probably reinforces the manufacturer's opinion that they should just create Intel based products...?

I want one. I can't get any of these. All of these are kinda bad / quite limited / would be a "I want them for the AMD label, although they suck in some ways" decision.

I'm on a similar situation. I'm looking for a smallish, throw-into-any-backback-and-carry-everywhere laptop. The new chips are interesting, but the few launch devices all have one flaw or another.

Fortunately, I can live without such a laptop, for now. I'll just keep an eye out for updates.

I suspect this will go into the next generation of consoles too. Both xbox and ps4 (also pro and x version) contain the old jaguar core from amd.

But what's up with the single channel ram in the ibm one? Both of the others have dual-channel.

Yeah that AMD managed to land the supply contract for both Sony and Microsoft is a big deal.

Chiming in to agree about Ars. I was really disappointed to see how there was no fact checking when the Voynich Manuscript "decoding" came out (granted they did publish an article retracting it, but even a cursory amount of fact checking could have told you that theory held no water), I simply don't trust any articles they publish outside of their core tech competency (and seeing articles like this hurt even my trust on that). I would like to see an alternative, but the only thing I really read for tech news past them is here.

The voynich issue was a black spot. But somehow they tried to evolve bigger and got far from what they were. It was a very simple website before but the articles and people around were high grade. Now it's big thing with less quality all around.

Market dynamics I suppose.

The last thing to do is adding a bunch of pro-SJW topics and you got another Verge/Vox/Polygon.

They already did that when they went anti-GG and started taking cues from people like Brianna Wu. That was the start of the decline for them.

Anti-GG is a good thing in my book.

How so?

Do you have alternative sources you would recommend instead of Ars? I quite like ars but if there are better publications out there I'd love to know.

Not found anything worthwhile really. Slashdot is still decent. Of course HN. User-run sites tend to be better. But I stopped reading Ars and The Register a while ago due to slippages in journalistic quality and various other hit pieces.

To be fair, The Register is good at UK/Oz/storage news, as well as puns - if those don't interest you, it's probably not worth reading. Also not sure what level of "journalistic quality" you're expecting from El Reg? Or any news outlet for that matter.

How about writing and publishing actual facts rather than hit pieces? I've seen El Reg push out several articles about non-UK things that were patently wrong -- and that their userbase ripped them for. No apology, no retraction, no update.

anandtech.com may be worth a look.

That has been going downhill since Anand left.

The death kneel for me regarding Ars was that they shut down their Open Source section while their Apple section kept spilling over into their other sections.

More and more i felt the place could be rechristened Apple Technica.

I feel like it went from being a news site for Linux-loving geeks to being a news site for centre-left Apple fans.

I still love their article on setting up one's own mail server. That was probably the high-water point for their quality.

It's too bad about Ars. It's the same problem, except exacerbated, with Wired-- nowadays there's just the odd good long-form article. Over the last few years almost half of the print magazine has been devoted to progressive issues from a tech angle rather than tech- and the rest revolves around fan-geekery, if that's a word.

Both are owned by Conde Nast...

MIT Technology Review remains superb, however: www.technologyreview.com

I'm finding myself enjoying Ars less and less. Recommendations for what to replace it with?

Mit tech review.

>Of course I'm not shocked that Ars picked it up. Their journalistic quality has majorly slipped over the last few years.

What does the fact that they picked a report that had an impact on a company (in other words a newsworthy story) with their "journalistic quality"?

Even if the report is back, it had an impact, and that should be reported. You'd rather they didn't covered stories involving upsetting things?