Regarding the Intel CPU issues, I must say I expected that; I couldn’t tell which manufacturer will have the issue first, but with the arms race of who’ll be the first to make the 0 nm node dye that draws a megawatt of power and needs to be cooled with liquid Helium, it’s a perfectly logical outcome. If I had to guess, I’d say they made transistors out of too little material at some critical part of the dye, and with thermal migration within the material at operational temperatures the transistors basically stopped working properly.

So, basically, the real question is who actually needs a CPU of that power on a single-CPU client machine? We’re talking 24 cores, 32 threads, 5.8 GHz boost clock, 219W max. power at full turbo boost. This is sheer insanity, and it’s obvious that my ridiculous exaggeration about megawatts of power isn’t even that much more ridiculous than the actual specs of that thing. So, who even needs that? I certainly don’t. Gamers? They probably think they do, and they are likely the ones buying it. Developers? Video renderers? Graphics designers? I don’t know. But putting that many cores on one CPU, and clocking them this high, is sheer madness reminiscing of the Pentium IV era, where they clocked them so high, and with such dye layout, that a piece of malware appeared that deliberately iterated along the central path until it overheated so much the dye cracked, destroying the CPU.

I’m writing this on a Mac Studio M2 Max, which has more power than I realistically need, even for Lightroom, which is extremely demanding, and it’s idling at 38°C during the summer. It never makes a sound, it never overheats, and it’s absolutely and perfectly stable. I actually had the option of getting the model with twice the power for twice the money, which is an excellent deal, and I didn’t bother, because why would I? At some point, more power becomes a pointless exercise in dick-measuring. Sure, bigger is better, but is it, when it’s already half a meter long and as thick as a fire extinguisher? So this is the obvious consequence – Intel tried to win a dick measuring contest with AMD and made itself a meter long appendage, because bigger is better, and now it turned out it’s not fit for purpose? How surprising.