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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
The screw is an implementation of the inclined plane.
No, it's an implementation of HR policies.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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!
Pah. Chuck Norris seeks faster than APK Custom Hosts File Engine 9.0++.
Looks like Apple hired him. http://www.macrumors.com/2014/...
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
Hmm. Grandeur has delusions of Chuck Norris.
Everyone wishes they had never heard of you. Except Chuck Norris. He HAS never heard of you.
Yeah YOU can "BE" my STYLIST .
Meds, baby. Take 'em.
Take 'em all.
Chuck Norris takes his medicine ...