The Tech Report

Last updated
The Tech Report
The Tech Report Logo.png
Type of site
Technology website
Available in English
OwnersJohn Rampton and John Rall
Created byScott Wasson and Andy Brown
EditorRenee Johnson
URL techreport.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationOptional
Launched1999;25 years ago (1999)
Current statusActive

The Tech Report is a website that used to be dedicated to covering personal computing technology and culture. [1] The Tech Report specialized in hardware and produced quarterly system build guides at various price points, [2] and occasional price vs. performance scatter plots. [3] Tech Report also has an online community and used to have an active podcast. Some of the site's investigative articles regarding hardware benchmarking have been cited by other technology news sites like Anandtech [4] and PC World. [5] The site went through an ownership change and major redesign in the middle of 2019 after which the site's focus and content went through significant changes, no longer specializing in hardware or producing any system guides or podcasts and no longer being focused on computer technology.

Contents

History

Tech Report was founded by Scott 'Damage' Wasson, a Harvard Divinity School graduate, and Andy 'Dr. Evil' Brown. [1] Both started by writing at Ars Technica in 1998. The two later decided to launch their website. The site eventually grew into a business enterprise with multiple full-time staff members.

Tech Report was originally located at tech-report.com in 1999. The site was moved to techreport.com in 2003. [6]

On August 20, 2007, a beta for a new site design was posted in the forums for review by the user community. It was later moved to live.

Launching on January 1, 2011, the new site design, TR 3.0 rolled out. It offered a completely new layout and two user-switchable colors, blue and white, along with a reduced mobile device format.

On December 2, 2015, Scott Wasson, the founder and Editor-In-Chief stepped down as he accepted a role in AMD's graphics division. [7] [8] Wasson subsequently sold the company in March 2018 to Adam Eiberger, the Tech Report's business manager. [9]

On December 21, 2018 Jeff Kampman stepped down as Editor-In-Chief. [10] The site was then sold to investors John Rampton and John Rall, and Renee Johnson took over as Editor-in-Chief.

On July 7, 2019, coinciding with the release of AMD's Ryzen 3 CPUs and Navi GPUs, a site redesign was launched, moving from the Tech Report's former custom CMS and functionality to a WordPress template. On July 9, Johnson posted an introduction to the design. [11] The new redesign was met with criticism from the users. [12] In August of the same year, TechReport staff removed all mention of former Editor-in-Chief Jeff Kampman at his request and replaced his name with Renee Johnson on all articles Kampman contributed. [13] His "farewell" message that he posted on December 21 of 2018 was also deleted from the site. The TechReport "About" page was also edited, and all information about the original founders was removed. The focus of the site has also changed from a focus on hardware news, reviews, and system guides to product promotion articles presented as reviews without using actual products or providing benchmark data for them [14] and to so-called listicles, which may or may not be related to computing technology. [15]

AMD TLB bug investigation

TechReport was one of the first sites in 2007 to document and benchmark the flaw in the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) of AMD Phenom CPUs. Despite claims by AMD that the initial BIOS fix would only result in 10% performance decrease, benchmarks by TechReport have revealed that the performance impact by the initial BIOS fix was much more severe, up to nearly 20% on average, with some applications such as Firefox experiencing performance decrease of 57% in tests. [16] They were also the first one to notify about AMD stopping the shipment of processors due to this bug. [17] [18]

Video game and GPU performance benchmarking research

On September 8, 2011, Scott Wasson posted an article titled "Inside the second: A new look at game benchmarking". This showed gamers that frames per second (FPS) are not the only thing that matters in "smooth" gameplay, but frame latency has a big part. [19] This innovative benchmarking method was later mentioned and acknowledged by other publications such as Anandtech, which described this method as "a revolution in the 3D game benchmarking scene" [4] [20] and Overclockers. [21]

SSD Endurance Experiment

In 2013, TechReport started an experiment using several SSD drives to determine how many writes they can endure. This test lasted for more than 18 months before all drives used in this test failed, enduring much larger amount of written data than rated by manufacturers themselves, [22] [5] and even prompting one of the manufacturers, Samsung, to release a humorous music video dedicated to this test. [23]

Site Structure

Main Page

A large portion of the main page was dedicated to "News" and "Blog" entries. Among the news entries were "Shortbread" posts which offered a summary breakdown of reviews and news offered by other sites. Featured articles were often reviews of newly released PC hardware that had been tested by the site's editors and judged on several metrics including performance and value compared to other available hardware. After the takeover of the site by new owners and major changes the "Shortbread" feature ended and most "reviews" consist of products being presented for advertising purposes through referral links without actual review of those products by the site editors. [24]

Podcast

Adapting to the general trend of more content for digest, The Tech Report launched its podcast on February 9, 2008, hosted by Jordan Drake. While the schedule has varied it provides a casual but quite in-depth look back at the topics that made news from a panel of the site staff. After 2015 episodes were released irregularly, frequently discussing the release of a new microarchitecture with David Kanter of Real World Technologies. [25] The last episode was made in January 2018.

Community and Forum

Tech Report has a phpBB-styled forum that is unrestricted in read-only form and open to the public for contribution via simple registration. The forum is primarily structured around computer technology and related topics, but debates also range from politics and religion in the "opt-in only" R&P forum to general random chatter in the Back Porch. Contributors to the website also have access to a restricted forum called the Smoky Back Room. Registered users may respond to news topics and other entries posted on the front page in an isolated threaded comments section that automatically attaches to each new entry. Although access to the main page comments is linked to the user database, the discussions are logged separately from the forum area of the site and are not counted toward the user forum statistics.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AMD</span> American semiconductor company

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets.

Radeon is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of AMD. The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI Technologies, which was acquired by AMD in 2006 for US$5.4 billion.

nForce4 Motherboard chipset

The nForce4 is a motherboard chipset released by Nvidia in October 2004. The chipset supports AMD 64-bit processors and Intel Pentium 4 LGA 775 processors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AMD CrossFire</span> Brand name by AMD; multi-GPU technology

AMD CrossFire is a brand name for the multi-GPU technology by Advanced Micro Devices, originally developed by ATI Technologies. The technology allows up to four GPUs to be used in a single computer to improve graphics performance.

The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a chip, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is: a better indication of this is transistor density.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AMD APU</span> Marketing term by AMD

AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), formerly known as Fusion, is a series of 64-bit microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), combining a general-purpose AMD64 central processing unit (CPU) and 3D integrated graphics processing unit (IGPU) on a single die.

Adreno is a series of graphics processing unit (GPU) semiconductor intellectual property cores developed by Qualcomm and used in many of their SoCs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AMD Phenom</span> Series of CPUs by AMD

Phenom is the 64-bit AMD desktop processor line based on the K10 microarchitecture, in what AMD calls family 10h processors, sometimes incorrectly called "K10h". Triple-core versions belong to the Phenom 8000 series and quad cores to the AMD Phenom X4 9000 series. The first processor in the family was released in 2007.

Graphics Core Next (GCN) is the codename for a series of microarchitectures and an instruction set architecture that were developed by AMD for its GPUs as the successor to its TeraScale microarchitecture. The first product featuring GCN was launched on January 9, 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AMD FX</span> Series of high-end microprocessors by AMD

AMD FX is a series of high-end AMD microprocessors for personal computers which debuted in 2011, claimed as AMD's first native 8-core desktop processor. The line was introduced with the Bulldozer microarchitecture at launch, and was then succeeded by its derivative Piledriver in 2012.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Radeon 200 series</span> Series of video cards

The Radeon 200 series is a series of graphics processors developed by AMD. These GPUs are manufactured on a 28 nm Gate-Last process through TSMC or Common Platform Alliance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GeForce 900 series</span> Series of GPUs by Nvidia

The GeForce 900 series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, succeeding the GeForce 700 series and serving as the high-end introduction to the Maxwell microarchitecture, named after James Clerk Maxwell. They are produced with TSMC's 28 nm process.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mantle (API)</span> Low-overhead rendering API

Mantle was a low-overhead rendering API targeted at 3D video games. AMD originally developed Mantle in cooperation with DICE, starting in 2013. Mantle was designed as an alternative to Direct3D and OpenGL, primarily for use on personal computers, although Mantle supports the GPUs present in the PlayStation 4 and in the Xbox One. In 2015, Mantle's public development was suspended and in 2019 completely discontinued, as DirectX 12 and the Mantle-derived Vulkan rose in popularity.

The Radeon 400 series is a series of graphics processors developed by AMD. These cards were the first to feature the Polaris GPUs, using the new 14 nm FinFET manufacturing process, developed by Samsung Electronics and licensed to GlobalFoundries. The Polaris family initially included two new chips in the Graphics Core Next (GCN) family. Polaris implements the 4th generation of the Graphics Core Next instruction set, and shares commonalities with the previous GCN microarchitectures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zen (first generation)</span> 2017 AMD 14-nanometre processor microarchitecture

Zen is the codename for the first iteration in a family of computer processor microarchitectures of the same name from AMD. It was first used with their Ryzen series of CPUs in February 2017. The first Zen-based preview system was demonstrated at E3 2016, and first substantially detailed at an event hosted a block away from the Intel Developer Forum 2016. The first Zen-based CPUs, codenamed "Summit Ridge", reached the market in early March 2017, Zen-derived Epyc server processors launched in June 2017 and Zen-based APUs arrived in November 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">3D XPoint</span> Discontinued computer memory type

3D XPoint is a discontinued non-volatile memory (NVM) technology developed jointly by Intel and Micron Technology. It was announced in July 2015 and was available on the open market under the brand name Optane (Intel) from April 2017 to July 2022. Bit storage is based on a change of bulk resistance, in conjunction with a stackable cross-grid data access array. Initial prices are less than dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) but more than flash memory.

Zen+ is the codename for a computer processor microarchitecture by AMD. It is the successor to the first gen Zen microarchitecture, and was first released in April 2018, powering the second generation of Ryzen processors, known as Ryzen 2000 for mainstream desktop systems, Threadripper 2000 for high-end desktop setups and Ryzen 3000G for accelerated processing units (APUs).

PC Perspective is a web site dedicated to news and reviews of personal computing and gaming hardware. PC Perspective specializes in hardware that is most relevant to home users and enthusiasts. The site also has an active online community, a weekly podcast, and founder Ryan Shrout was the co-host of TWiT.tv's This Week in Computer Hardware.

Heaven Benchmark is benchmarking software based on the UNIGINE Engine. The benchmark was developed and published by UNIGINE Company in 2009. The main purpose of software is performance and stability testing for GPUs. Users can choose a workload preset, Basic or Extreme, or set the parameters by custom. The benchmark 3D scene is a steampunk-style city on flying islands in the middle of the clouds. The scene is GPU-intensive because of tessellation used for all the surfaces, dynamic sky with volumetric clouds and day-night cycle, real-time global illumination, and screen-space ambient occlusion.

Superposition Benchmark is benchmarking software based on the UNIGINE Engine. The benchmark was developed and published by UNIGINE Company in 2017. The main purpose of software is performance and stability testing for GPUs. Users can choose a workload preset, Low to Extreme, or set the parameters by custom. The benchmark 3D scene is an office of a fictional genius scientist from the middle of the 20th century. The scene is GPU-intensive because of SSRTGI, proprietary dynamic lighting technology by Unigine.

References

  1. 1 2 TechReport's "About Us" page. August 8, 2009.
  2. TechReport's Summer 2009 System Guide. June 25, 2009.
  3. The value proposition June 9, 2009
  4. 1 2 Smith, Ryan. "AMD Frame Pacing Explored: Catalyst 13.8 Brings Consistency to Crossfire". www.anandtech.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  5. 1 2 Paul, Ian. "Grueling endurance test blows away SSD durability fears". www.pcworld.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  6. , 'Whois.net data for tech-report.com'. September 7, 2008.
  7. "Into a new era". techreport.com.
  8. Smith, Ryan (3 December 2015). "Scott Wasson Announces His Retirement from The Tech Report". Anandtech. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
  9. Kampman, Jeff (28 February 2018). "The Tech Report secures an independent future". Tech Report. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
  10. "So long, farewell". techreport.com. Archived from the original on 2019-01-09.
  11. "TechReport New Design". techreport.com.
  12. "Tech Report New Look". techreport.com.
  13. "Contribution by author".
  14. "Trendnet WiFi Mesh Router System AC2200". techreport.com.
  15. "11 Ways to Boost Productivity in the Workplace". techreport.com.
  16. Swinburne, Richard. "AMD's Phenom TLB errata benchmarked". www.bit-tech.net. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  17. G, Andreas. "TLB bug turns AMD's plans upside down big time". www.nordichardware.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  18. Hruska, Joel. "Phantom Phenom's perplexing processor problem behind product delay". www.arstechnica.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  19. Hruska, Joel. "After almost 20 years, GPU benchmarking is moving past frames per second". www.extremetech.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  20. Smith, Ryan. "AMD Comments on GPU Stuttering, Offers Driver Roadmap & Perspective on Benchmarking". www.anandtech.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  21. Vaughan, Jeremy. "Our Take On NVIDIA's FCAT GPU Testing". www.overclockers.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  22. Hruska, Joel. "Which SSDs are the most reliable? Massive study sheds some light". www.extremetech.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  23. Bourque, Brad. "A victory in SSD endurance has Samsung singing". finance.yahoo.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  24. "AKASO Brave 6 Plus Action Camera: Ready For All Types of Adventures". techreport.com.
  25. "Archive – The Tech Report". techreport.com.