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Anand Lal Shimpi Retires From AnandTech
An anonymous reader writes: If you've built a PC in the past 17.5 years, chances are you read some hardware reviews on AnandTech at some point. The site's creator, Anand Lal Shimpi, has announced that he is retiring from the tech writing business. He said, "AnandTech started as a site that primarily reviewed motherboards, then we added CPUs, video cards, cases, notebooks, Macs, smartphones, tablets and anything else that mattered. The site today is just as strong in coverage of new mobile devices as it is in our traditional PC component coverage ... To the millions of readers who have visited and supported me and the site over the past 17+ years, I owe you my deepest gratitude. You all enabled me to spend over half of my life learning more than I ever could have in any other position. The education I've received doing this job and the ability to serve you all with it is the most amazing gift anyone could ever ask for. You enabled me to get the education of a lifetime and I will never be able to repay you for that. Thank you."
Anands In-depth quality reviews will be missed!
Anandretro. It's like the old site, but reviews products for living without technology.
First up? The common lever.
Anand's consistent dedication to accurate and objective review metrics, as well as his crusade to put an SSD in every home computer, are both laudable. I hope the site will maintain the same lofty ideals without him at the helm.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
AnandTech is pretty much the only tech site I trust implicitly anymore. They don't do bullshit stories, they don't rush things out just because everyone else is, and they aren't afraid to criticize their own sponsor's products. More to the point, they know their stuff, and they have brought a lot more science to testing. They don't even test cases with actual computers in them anymore, they use strictly-controlled thermal loads and lab-grade probes because it wasn't repeatable enough. Hopefully Anand's spirit of accurate, thorough reporting will live on at Anandtech for years to come, because if they fail I don't know of anyone that could replace them.
nah.. clickbait about social issues draws more clicks.
Please, find a social justice article here: http://www.anandtech.com/
I liked Anandtech because they never sold out, or at least not as hard as, the other tech sites. You always felt there were real people doing their job and not just repeating talking points some company gave them. Reading the articles at Anandtech felt like reading a friend's webpage.
I hope the site made Anand a ton of money and he can live comfortably as he pursues new things.
I personally think Anandtech does overtly good reviews of Intel CPUs. I think they never gave AMD a fair shot. Having said that I think it's one of the best resources for computer hardware reviews in addition to tomshardware, overclock.net.
AMD processors are just simply slower and their fastest can *barely* keep up with an i5 . I know the truth hurts, but there you have it.
I didn't like Anandtech, nor Tom's nor hardly any of the other "enthusiast" sites because the people running them were amateurs. Every time I went to one of those websites it felt like a place where the blind were leading the blind. They simply didn't know what they didn't know. It was understandable - if you had the knowledge required to really understand the technology you wouldn't be writing reviews for a website, you'd be making 10x more money doing actual engineering and product development.
I guess part of the problem was that I was used to the early days of the net where people writing in comp.arch or Risks Digest were the actual engineers working on the systems they were talking about. Still, sites like Anandtech seemed to suck up resources that might have gone to making real expert knowledge and opinions accessible to a broader audience rather than putting amateurs on a pedestal.
There were some of those, and then there was a lot of WinTel shilling
Read the site since the beginning every time I needed an upgrade for components ever since Tom's Hardware sold out to its sponsors.
Anand and his writers were great and they changed the way that computer reviews were done online versus in magazine print in PC Magazine or Boot / Maximum PC.
His recommendation of OCZ products at every revision of the Vertex line of products deserves a black eye on his legacy though since the reports of failures of every Vertex line 1 through 4 were coming out consistently just a few months after release on sites like Newegg, HardOCZ, ExtremeSystems, Amazon, Overclokers, etc. Anand keep awarding Editors Choices to OCZ regardless of the volumes of failures.
He admonished Intel for their firmware bugs correctly but then white washed OCZ failures but back tracked and started mentioning their failures after it became common knowledge in the hardware circles.
Still he leaves a legacy for legitimate and notable online journalism that changed online reviews and reporting by legitimizing it and receiving sponsorship from manufacturers.
Uh......have you not noticed that AT has a full sponsored AMD section? They literally give AMD news special placement. The fact is, and I say this as someone whose only Intel processor is in his laptop, AMD performance sucks.
They're competitive usually on price to performance, but even the absolute top end 200+ watt 5GHz turbo AMD processor gets matched by mid-range i5s and stomped by i7s.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
I guess running tech sites ages you because he looks 50.
Mostly random stuff.
Back in the 90's when places like SharkyExtreme.com, jc-news.com, HardOCP.com and Tomshardware.com were "it", Anand Lai made a name for himself for his more than truthful video reviews. It was a new take on things with this guy Anand, sometimes sitting on a rock outside, chatting about computers.
I still trust much of the content on his site, but worry it'll go the way of sharkyextreme now. Perhaps legitreviews or some other can fill that void without Anand around.
Thank you for helping millions of us make good choices over the years Anand, I wish you the best!
Correction, HardOCP instead of HardOCZ, caught my own error since I was posting about OCZ Vertex product failures.
Also, I am guessing that Anand's "retirement" is more like "cashing-in" on the site. Good time to make money and run!
Commodity hardware reviews are dying out since they are getting less relevant to people. My machine is 5-years old and still going strong after 2-SDD upgrades and 3-video card upgrades. No need to replace the whole thing and upgrade anymore since my computer is running idle the vast majority of time.
SSDs were the last great upgrade for computers ever since the whole CPU and RAM and Video Card wars were decided and settled.
Next upgrade will most likely be when 4K displays become common place with the next Windows 9 OS that scales things correctly for them and video hardware that can support it well without performance issues. That'll be another 2-years or so and then I'll look at replacing my computer's insides since it looks like ATX cases and 750W power supplies are here to stay and quite enough.
Ok, I guess, as long as it is not an Apple product. If it is, then all that is thrown out of the window and the product is deemed "great" and worth the extra cost. This is most obvious in the smartphone sections. For example you can read the "android user on an iPhone 5S" article, and he lists all those important limitations of iOS that would definitely turn any Android user away, but says they are "temporary" and inexplicably concludes that iOS is not a worse experience. Similarly, supposedly they would test all important smartphone releases, however they review each iphone multiple times (seriously, check it out), then some popular Androids and that's it. They missed things like the N9, which was probably the best phone when it came out (as I had an iPhone, an Android and a N9 at the time), and don't try anything that could appear too price competitive to Apple devices (like Xiaomi). The Mac/Macbook etc reviews are similarly biased, the site seems to be in awe of Apple and everything they make. As an owner of a Mac Pro, a Mac Mini, 3 iPhones (all company provided) and the experience with them and all Apple products in our company, I am not similarly awed (I could write long stories here).
So, yeah, Anandtech, while it is not as good as it used to be, it is probably still (one of) the best (although for PSUs and an alternative take on GPUs you should look at HardOCP), but be wary of the Apple bias.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
If anything I owe him for all the help I've received over the years.
In both hardware & software @ NTCompatible.com since 1997: FACT -> http://www.ntcompatible.com/ra... ( + long BEFORE that 2001 post as well, as far back as 1996 in fact, see next "proof thereof"):
Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61
(&, for work done for EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com on PAID CONTRACT (writing portions of their SuperCache program increasing its performance by up to 40% via my work) albeit, for their SuperDisk & HOW TO APPLY IT, took them to a finalist position @ MS Tech Ed, two years in a row 2000-2002, in its HARDEST CATEGORY: SQLServer Performance Enhancement).
APK
P.S.=> As far back as 1997, I was doing what the "mainstream masses" have been only recently up to, using memory based devices vs. disks for less latency +f aster seek/access (both in software AND in hardware 1999 onwards via a CENATEK "RocketDrive" 2gb PC-133 SDRAM PCI 2.2 bus ramdrive board & more recently a Gigabyte IRAM 4gb DDR-2 SATA I/II bus ramdrive board too).
I use them as follows for home systems:
Since 1992 or so, 1st using separate HDDs (slower seek/access by FAR) & then using software ramdisks per the list below (on a MS-DDK based one I wrote in fact, on how I apply them):
Then applying Software-Based Ramdrives to database work with EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com on paid contract (which did me VERY WELL @ both Windows IT Pro magazine in reviews, & also MS TechEd 2000-2002 in its hardest category: SQLServer Performance Enhancement & SuperSpeed.com too - since I improved their wares efficacy by up to 40% via programmatic control & tuning programs for them) - which, only the past few years now it seems, OTHERS are finally "latching onto" for performance purposes in database work in industrial environs! The EEC/SuperSpeed.com unit had 1 great thing going for it - mirroring back to HDD to save state of data!)
I move the following off my wd Velociraptor SATA II 10,000 rpm 16mb buffered harddisks that are driven off a Promise Ex-8350 128mb ECC ram caching raid sata 1/2 controller (which defers/delays writes via said cache, & also lessens physical head movement on disks & this is where I am going to make it even faster via lessening its workloads, read on & reduces fragmentation as well in the same stroke - "bonus") onto my 4gb DDR2 Gigabyte IRAM PCIExpress ramdisk card 2006-present (& before it, a CENATEK "RocketDrive" 4gb PC-133 SDRAM based one on PCI 2.2 bus circa 2002-2006):
A.) Pagefile.sys (partition #1 1gb size, rest is on 3gb partition next - this I didn't do on software ramdrives though)
B.) OS & App level logging (EventLogs + App Logging)
C.) WebBrowser caches, histories, sessions & browsers too
D.) Print Spooling
E.) %Temp% ops (OS & user level temp ops environmental variable values alterations)
F.) %Tmp% ops (OS & user level temp ops environmental variable values alterations)
G.) %Comspec% (command interpreter location, cmd.exe in this case, & in DOS/Win9x years before, command.com also)
H.) Lastly - I also place my custom hosts file onto it, via redirecting where it's referenced by the OS, here in the registry (for performance AND security):
HKLM\system\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\Parameters
(Specifically altering the "DataBasePath" parameter there which also acts more-or-less, like a *NIX shadow password system also!)
* All of which lessen the amount of work my "main" OS & programs slower mechanical hard disks have to do, "speeding them up" by lessening their workload, fragmentation, and speeding up access/seek latency for the things in the list above too.
HDD's concentrate on program &/or data fetches that are still hdd bound (& not kernelmode diskcaching subsystem cached in 4gb of DDR3 system ram here either yet) done on a media that has no heads to move, & thus, more mechanical latency + slower seek/access as you get on hard disks + reduced filesystem fragmentations due to that all, also & it works!
... apk
It's all about target demographics. The last few times I've built desktop PCs I've been on a budget and that's where AMD becomes really interesting. AMD CPUs are usually good enough (especially in gaming rigs where desktop CPU performace has become essentially irrelevant years ago) and can be faster than Intels at the same price point - not because AMD is better but because Intel is more expensive, especially once you factor in that Intel mainboards also tend to have higher prices.
Sure, Intel CPUs are better. But if you don't do heavily CPU-intensive tasks (ie. if you use your computer for generic consumer-type stuff) AMD's ones are adequate and cheap. Intel is great in workstations but most people don't need a workstation. That's why AMD is still alive. It's pretty much the VHS of x86/amd64.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
AMD processors are just simply slower and their fastest can *barely* keep up with an i5
While that might be the case today, the person you're responding to is talking about the past 17.5 years. Intel hasn't always had the fastest processors during that time.
Except most people buy laptops where performance/watt matters, and Intel really wins here as well. Haswell stomps just about everything else in terms of power drain.
Your memory must be shabby.
He recommended OCZ SSD's when they were SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than the competition. They were the first non premium priced SSD with intel like performance and no huge latency spikes when writing small files.
Yeah look a lot of them failed, I got burnt by many of them - but at the time the failure rate issue wasn't widespread. They were the Celeron 300a of SSD's and so he rightfully pushed them.
That's true. To be honest, my laptop runs on Intel, too. That's a market semgnet Intel is very good at. Still, budget desktop exists and I hope they will continue to keep AMD afloat because I really don't want to see what happens when Intel has x86/amd64 for itself. (Of course Intel probably doesn't want to see that, either; monopolies have this pesky habit of falling under antitrust regulations...)
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Try it in Linux, go to phoronix.com and look at the AMD and Intel benchmarks on Linux. Since most Linux apps are not compiled with the sabotaged Intel compiler like windows, the AMD cpu is much more competitive.
They cover AMD more than anyone and they're very much unbiased. I dunno what more you want out of them. The problem isn't that they're not giving AMD a fair shot, it's that AMD *sucks hard* in this day and age.
A $140 53W dual core i3 4330 is significantly faster than a $170 95W quad core A10-7850K in all benchmarks. Including the multithreaded ones despite the AMD CPU having twice as many cores. In single threaded stuff, there's just no contest. And it does it with almost half the power too.
More expensive, uses more power, and slower. Thus, bad performance/$ and performance/watt ratios too. I'd definitely buy AMD if they were a good value but right now they're not, no matter which way you look at it!
Call me when Linux arrives on the Desktop... been waiting 20 years ;)
> You enabled me to get the education of a lifetime and I will never be able to repay you for that.
WARNING: I don't speak for anyone, but I use a plural form ("us") instead of singular ("me") just for rhetorical reasons...
---
We can never repay what we receive. Never. It's not that many, many things come for free -- surely they come.
But we want to repay those who gave us free things, and yet we can't.
The opportunities seldom arise to do it, we often lose them, only to regret later no repaying a father or a mother, or even society at large for the things which were put in our plates. Of course, in many places, not everyone is so lucky. It only makes us feel even worse for not being able to properly repay or even thank, sometimes. (*)
But that's not the worse: we sometimes cannot repay or ask forgiveness to those we hurt or for the errors we make. This is the real problem.
I don't know the answer or how to solve it. But I see other people dealing well with these problems, so I guess I'll just imitate them for now.
(*) This is what makes me anger when I hear someone saying there's no free lunch. Of course, there is! At least, let us acknowledge what is given without anything asked in return. Or, like my parents would say, "we just want you to be happy and follow what is Right, that's pay enough for us."
BTW, thanks, Anand.
nah.. clickbait comment about non-existant clickbait about social (justice*) issues. (Who said it was about justice? me thinks you have an agenda!)
I have an OCZ Vertex LE, that was purchased and installed in my laptop shortly after they were recommended on Anandtech. Aside from super-shitty v1.0 firmware that would sometimes fail to write what you asked, I've *never* had any issue with it in the twenty-seven-thousand+ hours it's been running. In fact, it's the same drive that's the system drive in the machine that I'm typing this comment from.
(This drive was the drive that taught me to *always* upgrade the firmware in an SSD. There was a firmware upgrade available from the moment that I had the drive in my hands. At the time, I really wished that I had applied it.)
> Good time to make money and run!
Agreed! The seventeen year mark is the time honored departure point of every fly-by-night confidence man!
AMD has lost their way. The bobcat era of CPUs is crap. Pretending that people only use integer units is crap.
AMD needs to make real 6 core CPUs again and they need to do something about the insane power draw. They can get away with mediocre performance for a time if they got power consumption down. That is what will really kill them. At this point, their mobile GPUs have decent video and horrible CPU performance. If you're not able to use the video (like in *BSD) then it's a total waste of money. I've seen E series chips benchmark slower than Pentium D chips!
They need to throw some money at a good chip designer and let him work. A miracle has to happen and they're not going to get it with process improvements because they can't ever compete with intel on that.
That kid worked so hard,I don't think he's been out of his basement in nearly 18 years!
I personally think Anandtech does overtly good reviews of Intel CPUs. I think they never gave AMD a fair shot. Having said that I think it's one of the best resources for computer hardware reviews in addition to tomshardware, overclock.net.
AMD processors are just simply slower and their fastest can *barely* keep up with an i5 . I know the truth hurts, but there you have it.
Spoken like the brainwashed Intel fanboi you are.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Anand is a jerk. He once emailed my boss complaining I was posting too much on his forums. I called his mom. She's a nice woman and had no idea Anand was emailing people's bosses trying to get them fired.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
You're giving credit to a techie for Pete's sake that never even programmed around this environs (certainly not before I did & years before anyone HEARD of Anand La Shimpi even).
APK
P.S.=> Fact: I was @ the tech, YEARS before his website even existed & making trade shows for it (and doing well) + trade journals articles as well, & in both hardware AND software editions of ramdisks/ramdrives/ssd's, as well as programming them myself - has he? I *severely* doubt it - especially on ALL LEVELS CONCERNED as I was... apk
just had this inner light moment ..
(__)_(._.)__(_^_)_m(__)m m(_ _)m
Parent is clueless, if you google "Anandtech Athlon performance" you'll see several articles from 2001+ (you know, the years where AMD was competitive) that appear to be praising AMD.
If a site were telling you that AMD was a good buy for a general purpose computer-- unless they were talking about the A-series-- theyd be a pretty awful source.
If you think current AMD processors don't suck HARD then you're the biggest fanboi ever, if not outright delusional They've NEVER sucked this hard!
Said it before, saying it again -
AMD is a budget chip for gaming enthusiasts who only want to drop a $200 motherboard + APU upgrade into their tower to play current gen games. I thought it was fairly well understood by now that AMD is marketed to guys living in the midwest running $60 towers with neon accent piping visible through the plexiglas side windows.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Looks like his next job is confirmed to be at Apple, although what position is undisclosed. http://recode.net/2014/08/31/v...
So long, and thanks for all the chips!
Looks like Apple hired him. http://www.macrumors.com/2014/...
When I first got interested in PC learning and building, your site was the 1st one I found! Since then, I have read most of your
information and have learned a lot. Thanks you again for excellent work and information.
See subject-line: That's all you need to know... lol!
* :)
"It's not easy being 'world-class'..."
APK
P.S.=> Like me!
... apk
They've actually been one of the fairest reviewers of AMD that I've seen. Consistently choosing non-Intel-optimized benchmarks. It's one of the reasons I kept going to them. I actually think it was a bit unfair to ditch the 640x480 game tests. In 4 years, I want to know how well my game is going to perform when the CPU can't keep up.
one thing that impresses me is how much aliasing there seems to be between slashdot's and anandtech's viewership
Best not to say "Try it in Linux" on Slashdot, you're a lot more likely to run in to someone who already has. My laptop and server are exclusively Linux and my desktop dual-boots. Ubuntu LTS all around, 14.04.1 on the desktop/laptop and I haven't gotten around to upgrading the server from 12.04.5 yet. AMD even lost performance per clock compared to themselves with their recent chips.
My home server previously ran a Phenom II X4 945, a 3 GHz quad core released in mid-late '09. That motherboard blew up after a power event so I switched to an A10-7850K, a 3.7-4.0 (turbo) GHz quad core released in January of this year. It's both faster clocked and a full four years newer, plus I threw double the RAM at it since I had to get new sticks anyways for DDR3 vs the old DDR2, yet somehow it's slower in the real world. My usenet downloads parcheck/extract slower, my Minecraft server bogs down more often, and it can't even manage to proxy Steam traffic at the full 100mbit/sec my internet connection allows.
As for Phoronix, how's this one? The very processor I'm running, the top model of the latest core AMD has released.
In looking at the results the AMD A10-7850K is supposed to be in line with the Intel Core i5 4670K according to AMD's expectations. However, with Ubuntu Linux on this hardware the Core i5 4670 (non-K) was generally running noticeably faster than the Kaveri APU. This is a big deal since the Kaveri APU sells for $190 USD where as the i5-4670 is not much more at a price of about $218.
It barely holds with the Core i3s on average.
I have historically defaulted to AMD. My last Intel outside of laptops was a 300 MHz Pentium II. I regret going with AMD for the server and unless they pull something huge out of their ass in the near future I'll be changing my desktop over as soon as the prices drop on the now last-gen Intels.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Anand first review was about an Amd....
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Thanks Anand. Your site made life easier for a lot of people as well as helped to keep the manufacturers on their toes.
Chuck Norris has delusions of grandeur wishing HE was ME (learn to read, troll, & get on topic)!
APK
P.S.=> Fact is, I *think* YOU wish you were ME too (lol)... apk
Please leave the AMD fanboys alone, stop trying to convince random strangers that AMD is not as good. We need someone to keep buying AMD stuff to keep AMD alive. Otherwise Intel might screw us.
Everyone wishes they had never heard of you. Except Chuck Norris. He HAS never heard of you.
What's particularly funny about this statement is that AT has been chastised about having an AMD bias in the past (original Opteron/Athlon 64 days). I think this simply shows that there was no bias; they stated what was best then (AMD) and now (Intel) from a sheer performance standpoint.
That said, many of their SoC reviews show AMD as having an edge over Intel.
Don't worry about anyone else then Mr. "ne'er-do-well" off topic troll nobody's heard of. Learn to write too. You use too many "and"s between items in your sentences creating run on sentences, moron.
See subject, and my writing's better than run on sentences from you, an off topic troll.
Take 'em all.
This time it's that you have experience in the shrink's office + meds use before that.
Chuck Norris takes his medicine ...