Amp Blasts: Intel

Note: Like always, this is intended to be somewhat comedic despite having some elements of truth.

Today, I take aim on the biggest CPU maker for personal computers, Intel. The reason that I am taking aim against them though is not for the reasons most people think I would. The reality is that Intel's products are better than AMD's products since the introduction of the Core 2 Duo and the introduction of the Core i5 and Core i7 has solidified this further. However, there are a couple of things that I strongly take issue with.

First off, there is the OTHER hardware that it makes such as it's sound hardware, networking hardware, and graphics hardware. While their high end networking hardware is high end, most of their products are not and are lower quality. The sound hardware used is of the AC'97 sound codec design and does not use hardware acceleration, which I consider to be a huge step backwards compared to prior generations of sound hardware. There is also the graphics hardware, which has been nothing short of terrible for most things practical until enough people finally galvanized Intel to including it on the processor itself, but it is still nothing to write home about. They need to stick with making higher end equipment and stop making lower quality work as it is not making them any legitimate profit in the end due to it being practically given away.

Then there is the Intel Atom, which I consider to be nothing short of a war crime of a processor. This 1.6 ghz design was used for net-books and could not handle videos worth anything. While it did get better, it was a mediocre product and the move to Haskell shows that Intel does acknowledge this since it is going to become a relic of the past. This is not my biggest gripe however.

The coolers that Intel provide for their processors is the biggest load of shit I have ever seen in my life hands down. The basic reality is that nobody should consider processors that run above 60 C to be acceptable. For that matter, when I am seeing numerous cooling benchmarks reporting that the stock cooler failed under max load, that shows me that the company making the cooler has their head up its ass. With that in mind, anybody who buys a CPU with them should just throw their cooler in the trash and at least spend the $20 to buy a Cooler Master Hyper TX3 as that one cheap cooler ran 26 degrees C cooler than Intel's stock solution. Stock cooling needs to improve drastically and Intel needs to be held accountable for this.