The Tech Report

Last updated
Techreport
Techreport-logo(4).svg
Type of site
 Technology website
Available in English
OwnersThe Tech Report Inc.
Created byScott Wasson and Andy Brown
EditorVlad Melnic, Alpa Somaiya, Amy Clark
URL techreport.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationOptional
Launched1999;26 years ago (1999)
Current statusActive

Techreport (formerly "The Tech Report") is one of the oldest hardware, news, and tech review sites. [1] Techreport specialized in hardware and produced quarterly system build guides at various price points, [2] and occasional price vs. performance scatter plots. [3] It 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] Currently, the publication is focused on technology news, informational how tos, and consumer guides on topics such as software, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, VPNs, antivirus software, and more. [6]

Contents

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.

In 2023, the editorial team was rebuilt and the entire content process overhauled to ensure the publication's focus on content quality, but also alignment with consumer interests, and the cornerstones of journalistic ethos, namely objectivity, accuracy and truthfulness. [7] [8] The Techreport website was also redesigned to improve user experience, while the branding (formerly "The Tech Report", now "Techreport") and logo were updated to a more modern look. [6] [9]

History

Tech Report was founded by Scott Wasson, a Harvard Divinity School graduate, and Andy 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. [10]

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. [11] [12] Wasson subsequently sold the company in March 2018 to Adam Eiberger, the Tech Report's business manager. [13]

On December 21, 2018 Jeff Kampman stepped down as Editor-In-Chief. [14] 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. [15] The new redesign was met with criticism from the users. [16] 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. [17] 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 [18] and to so-called listicles, which may or may not be related to computing technology. [19]

When the site's editorial team was revamped in 2023, the company recruited a team of technology, finance, and cybersecurity experts [8] [20] with the aim of increasing editorial quality and restoring the journalistic integrity of the content process. The new iteration of Techreport's editorial team is focused on creating unbiased, human-only technology content that addresses the needs of consumers, at no cost to the consumer. [7]

A product testing methodology was introduced by the new Techreport team. Contributors now have to test and interact with product and services, providing images and proof of testing as part of the publication process. In addition, Techreport now maintains editorial independence, which means that coverage and product recommendations are the result of testing, and represent the views of author at the time of publication. While the site still uses an affiliate marketing model to fund the cost of publishing, earnings from vendors do not dictate the team's views on any products or services. [20]

Leadership and Culture

Techreport's content is written, edited, and fact checked by people. Writers never use AI tools, and the company is committed to the idea that exceptional tech content written by people content takes time. In addition, the editorial team is now working 100% remotely, and the organization has switched to a model of empathetic leadership, where people's ability to produce quality work without undue pressure is a chief consideration when establishing individual KPIs. [7] [20]

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. [21] They were also the first one to notify about AMD stopping the shipment of processors due to this bug. [22] [23]

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. [24] 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] [25] and Overclockers. [26]

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, [27] [5] and even prompting one of the manufacturers, Samsung, to release a humorous music video dedicated to this test. [28]

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. [29]

As of 2023, the new editorial team reduced the scope of Techreport's product reviews and consumer technology guides was greatly reduced, allowing contributors to perform thorough, hands-on testing of all the products and services being discussed. The change was necessary in order to align content processes with the ethos of producing useful and informative consumer-focused content. [20]

The structure of Techreport's information and homepage was updated to make it easier for readers to navigate. "News is covered in its own category, and "Software Guides" are organized by parent category, for example VPNs, Antivirus, and Artificial Intelligence. [6]

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. [30] 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 multinational technology company

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that designs and develops central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), system-on-chip (SoC), and high-performance compute solutions. AMD serves a wide range of business and consumer markets, including gaming, data centers, artificial intelligence (AI), and embedded systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphics processing unit</span> Specialized electronic circuit; graphics accelerator

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit initially designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. After their initial design, GPUs were found to be useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure. Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and cryptocurrency mining.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Radeon</span> Brand of computer products

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.

<i>AnandTech</i> Defunct online computer hardware magazine owned by Future plc

AnandTech was an online computer hardware magazine owned by Future plc. It was founded in April 1997 by then-14-year-old Anand Lal Shimpi, who served as CEO and editor-in-chief until August 30, 2014, with Ryan Smith replacing him as editor-in-chief. The web site was a source of hardware reviews for off-the-shelf components and exhaustive benchmarking, targeted towards computer-building enthusiasts, but later expanded to cover mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

<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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sandy Bridge</span> Intel processor microarchitecture

Sandy Bridge is the codename for Intel's 32 nm microarchitecture used in the second generation of the Intel Core processors. The Sandy Bridge microarchitecture is the successor to Nehalem and Westmere microarchitecture. Intel demonstrated an A1 stepping Sandy Bridge processor in 2009 during Intel Developer Forum (IDF), and released first products based on the architecture in January 2011 under the Core brand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AMD APU</span> Series of microprocessors 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.

Unified Video Decoder is the name given to AMD's dedicated video decoding ASIC. There are multiple versions implementing a multitude of video codecs, such as H.264 and VC-1.

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">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 were 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. In 2015, Mantle's public development was suspended and in 2019 completely discontinued, as DirectX 12 and the Mantle-derived Vulkan rose in popularity.

High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a computer memory interface for 3D-stacked synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) initially from Samsung, AMD and SK Hynix. It is used in conjunction with high-performance graphics accelerators, network devices, high-performance datacenter AI ASICs, as on-package cache in CPUs and on-package RAM in upcoming CPUs, and FPGAs and in some supercomputers. The first HBM memory chip was produced by SK Hynix in 2013, and the first devices to use HBM were the AMD Fiji GPUs in 2015.

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">Kaby Lake</span> Intel microprocessor, released in 2016

Kaby Lake is Intel's codename for its seventh generation Core microprocessor family announced on August 30, 2016. Like the preceding Skylake, Kaby Lake is produced using a 14 nanometer manufacturing process technology. Breaking with Intel's previous "tick–tock" manufacturing and design model, Kaby Lake represents the optimized step of the newer process–architecture–optimization model. Kaby Lake began shipping to manufacturers and OEMs in the second quarter of 2016, with its desktop chips officially launched in January 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, using a phenomenon known as Ovonic Threshold Switch (OTS). Initial prices are less than dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) but more than flash memory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AMD Instinct</span> Brand of data center GPUs by AMD

AMD Instinct is AMD's brand of data center GPUs. It replaced AMD's FirePro S brand in 2016. Compared to the Radeon brand of mainstream consumer/gamer products, the Instinct product line is intended to accelerate deep learning, artificial neural network, and high-performance computing/GPGPU applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ryzen</span> AMD brand for microprocessors

Ryzen is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors, designed and marketed by AMD for desktop, mobile, server, and embedded platforms, based on the Zen microarchitecture. It consists of central processing units (CPUs) marketed for mainstream, enthusiast, server, and workstation segments, and accelerated processing units (APUs), marketed for mainstream and entry-level segments, and embedded systems applications.

Zen+ is the name 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.

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. 1 2 3 "Techreport". Techreport. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  7. 1 2 3 "Techreport's Editorial Policy and Mission Statement". Techreport. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  8. 1 2 "About Us - Meet the Techreport Team". Techreport. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  9. ↑ "Techreport". LinkedIn. Retrieved 2025-01-09.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  10. ↑ , 'Whois.net data for tech-report.com'. September 7, 2008.
  11. ↑ "Into a new era". techreport.com. 2 December 2015.
  12. ↑ Smith, Ryan (3 December 2015). "Scott Wasson Announces His Retirement from The Tech Report". Anandtech. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
  13. ↑ Kampman, Jeff (28 February 2018). "The Tech Report secures an independent future". Tech Report. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
  14. ↑ "So long, farewell". techreport.com. Archived from the original on 2019-01-09.
  15. ↑ "TechReport New Design". techreport.com. 9 July 2019.
  16. ↑ "Tech Report New Look". techreport.com.
  17. ↑ "Contribution by author".
  18. ↑ "Trendnet WiFi Mesh Router System AC2200". techreport.com. 7 July 2020.
  19. ↑ "11 Ways to Boost Productivity in the Workplace". techreport.com. 18 August 2020.
  20. 1 2 3 4 "Why Trust Techreport - Who We Are & What Guides Us". Techreport. Retrieved 2025-01-09.
  21. ↑ Swinburne, Richard. "AMD's Phenom TLB errata benchmarked". www.bit-tech.net. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  22. ↑ G, Andreas. "TLB bug turns AMD's plans upside down big time". www.nordichardware.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  23. ↑ Hruska, Joel (3 December 2007). "Phantom Phenom's perplexing processor problem behind product delay". www.arstechnica.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  24. ↑ Hruska, Joel. "After almost 20 years, GPU benchmarking is moving past frames per second". www.extremetech.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  25. ↑ Smith, Ryan. "AMD Comments on GPU Stuttering, Offers Driver Roadmap & Perspective on Benchmarking". www.anandtech.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  26. ↑ Vaughan, Jeremy. "Our Take On NVIDIA's FCAT GPU Testing". www.overclockers.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  27. ↑ Hruska, Joel. "Which SSDs are the most reliable? Massive study sheds some light". www.extremetech.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  28. ↑ Bourque, Brad. "A victory in SSD endurance has Samsung singing". finance.yahoo.com. Retrieved 2019-07-19.
  29. ↑ "AKASO Brave 6 Plus Action Camera: Ready For All Types of Adventures". techreport.com. 3 September 2020.
  30. ↑ "Archive – The Tech Report". techreport.com. 8 May 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.