Keyrock

Kind of ironic as Intel were the first to 64-bit, but their Itanium platform, while great at executing any 64-bit code, was EXTREMELY slow at executing 32-bit code, which it had to emulate. Itanium would probably be pretty great now that pretty much everything has native 64-bit code (in fact many programs do not have 32-bit code).

Opeth's Damnation album always very much reminded me of Diablo. While there is no exact 1 to 1 copy to Tristram on the album, I will post this:

Holy ****, Kroos! He really redeemed himself in the second half.

What a save by the Swedish keeper!

Boateng sent off, and deservedly so. There was no attempt at the ball.

The game is getting chippy.

ze Germans tie it up

I don't necessarily disagree with Jogi Low's strategy. Playing very forward, suffocating offense gives them the best chance to go far against the higher eschalon teams. Unfortunately, it also leaves them very susceptible to counters and ze Germans no longer have the defenders to recover, like in past cups. They can't give away the ball like that in the midfield.

That was a terrible giveaway from Kroos. His form has looked terrible this World Cup.

I'm sure Intel will recover, they have way too much money and way too many talented people. We've seen them pick themselves up from blunders before. I am reminded of the Pentium 4 space heater fiasco where Intel, almost blindly, chased the all mighty clock speed and ran face first into the 4 GHz thermal brick wall (fittingly their recent flirtations with 5GHz seem eerily familiar). Intel went back to the drawingboard and developed a design that emphasized IPC. Granted, at that time, Intel was able to use FUD and strongarm tactics to maintain a stranglehold on the market despite having an inferior product, until they brought a superior product to the market. This time, while I have no doubt Intel will again resort to FUD and strongarm tactics, I doubt those tactics will be anywhere near as successful and Intel will almost certainly lose a decent chunk of market to AMD. This, if it happens, will be good news for consumers, as AMD competing at a closer to even level with Intel should mean innovation and price wars.

Terrific strike by Sun Heung-Min. Too little too late, though.

Lack of competition inspires complacency, this is what drives me nuts about fanboy behaviour (well, one of the things, anyway) when they revel in a competitor struggling, unable to comprehend that this will lead to lesser products from their own hero. AMDs disastrous Bulldozer architecture left Intel in a position where they had such a massive advantage over their competition in the desktop and server markets that they had no compelling reason to invest in and innovate in those markets. Instead, Intel diverted most of their massive R&D force to going after the mobile market. It was a solid strategic move, the mobile market is where the big money is, it was just poorly executed. Intel stubbornly tried to force the Intel Atom architecture, an architecture poorly suited to functioning at the very low TDPs that smartphones operate at, into the mobile market, rather than engineering a new solution. Atom simply couldn't compete with ARM chips and no amount of Intel smashing their heads against a brick wall could make it happen. Intel managed to only get a tiny slice of the tablet market and basically none of the smartphone market. Meanwhile, Intel's desktop and server chips stagnated. Intel's design in those markets has been largely unchanged for the last decade and demands have shifted since then. Intel design scales poorly into high core counts and desktop and especially server demands have become increasingly highly threaded. I think Intel got caught with their pants down. They never envisioned AMD's Zen architecture would be such a smashing success. AMD's Zen managed to almost completely erase Intel's previously massive IPC advantage. Furthermore, AMD's Infinity Fabric design used in Zen scales incredibly well, allowing AMD to slap more and more CPU and memory modules together with extremely small hits to latency. This has left Intel in a bad position. They are currently stuck with an architecture that's rapidly becoming, quite frankly, obsolete. In the short term they have to use tricks and hacks to squeeze whatever life they can out of their current architecture, which has led to things like the utterly ridiculous 5 GHz 28-core presentation where they conveniently "forgot" to mention the insane hoops they had to jump through to get that demo to run. Intel is forced to use these shameful tactics because they, quite frankly, don't have anything that can compete with AMD's upcoming 32-core Threadripper. Intel has to develop a new architecture and do it soon. Their current architecture simply does not scale well enough with increasing core counts and that is where the market is going. Plus, Intel's IPC advantage is all but gone. Until they bring a new, highly-scalable, architecture to market, Intel is going to fall further and further behind because they simply cannot scale as well as AMD's Zen. No amount of tricks and hacks will make it happen.

Chicharito! El Tri are dominating.

The dispel mini-game in KoA might be the worst thing ever programmed, even worse than the Conficker virus.

The bottom line is that AMD has finally caught up to Intel in an area where Intel has traditionally always been a couple years ahead.

^ Not to mention that Krzanich's efforts to get Intel a piece of the highly lucrative mobile market have failed spectacularly.

Birthday Party Porn is probably a genre that exists... And potentially lands you in jail. Adults also have Birthday parties I stopped celebrating birthday parties in my late teens as did all my friends, so that's my point of reference.

Birthday Party Porn is probably a genre that exists... And potentially lands you in jail.

The two teams that made a trade at the top of the draft, the Hawks and Mavs, had the best first round IMHO. The Mavs got Luka Doncic who is, in my opinion, the best overall player in this draft when factoring in both NBA readiness and overall upside. The Hawks got Trae Young, who has massive upside, and a 2019 first rounder out of the deal.

TSMC officially went into 7nm semiconductor mass production today. AMD will be using 7nm for both its upcoming Zen 2 cpus and Vega gpus and may use both TSMC and Global Foundries as suppliers. It's interesting to see AMD surpass Intel in the dieshrink race Intel has traditionally always won, as Intel's 10nm process has fallen further and further behind and AMD will likely have 7nm processors by the time Intel has 10nm.

I'm sad Regalia isn't on a steeper discount. I am tempted to pick up Road Redemption, though.

I doubt it's Messi's last World Cup. This is, however, his last World Cup during his prime.

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