RE: Hardware Addicts #48

Liked the show, guys. Good job at covering Intel’s Alder lake. It does have a lot going on for it, and I too am glad intel has decided to pull the finger out. I jumped ship this year to AMD after all the SPECTRE and MELTDOWN design flaws, Yes. not bugs/exploits, actual design flaws. So I was curious to see how long it would take Intel to pivot to a completely new arch, and they have been busy.

One thing you did not mention though in your summation of where you want Intel to go, but I personally am hoping they can muscle in on the GPU front too. They don’t have to be top tier they only have to be good enough for most games at a competitive price and that will shake up both Nvidia and AMD in a good way too.

So hears to a new GPU manufacturer who is already friendly with Linux. And lets face it the Intel embedded GPU just works flawlessly with Linux and is always a good choice for Laptops or desktops.

Also, on the subject of firmware. If you have ever been involved in the embedded world you will know that flashing firmware ought not to be a minefield, however in practice it can be. When you have limited storage available to you, you have to come up with some quite elaborate tricks to make it work. One device I worked on actually read from a compressed file on storage to uncompress and overwrite the memory, while it was still running. The last segments would overwrite the stack with the new data and cause a reboot. A bit hairy really. But you have to ask yourself if that was a little ‘by the seat of your pants’ imagine how the software developers for Ingenuity’s firmware must feel flashing and waiting up to 24 mins to see if the update took?