XDefiant Shutting Down ▉

Mark Rubin, Executive Producer of XDefiant and former Call of Duty EP on his Twitter X account earlier today:

Hello XDefiant Fans,

I am unfortunately here today to announce that XDefiant will be shutting down.

Starting today (December 3, 2024), new downloads and player registrations will no longer be available. We will still release our Season 3 content in the near future (exact date TBD) and the servers will remain active until June 3, 2025. […]

A few years ago, Ubisoft and the SF Dev team embarked on a bold adventure to develop a new arcade shooter called XDefiant. It was from the start, an incredible challenge. Not only were we trying to shake up the genre by removing Skill-Based Matchmaking (SBMM) while bringing back a more “old-school” arcade shooter experience, but we were also diving into the high-risk, high-reward realm of free-to-play. And for that I want to applaud not only the Dev team but also Ubisoft leadership for taking that chance!

Free-to-play, in particular, is a long journey. Many free-to-play games take a long time to find their footing and become profitable. It’s a long journey that Ubisoft and the teams working on the game were prepared to make until very recently. But unfortunately, the journey became too much to sensibly continue.

I am, of course, heartbroken to have to be writing this post. Yes, this game has been a personal passion for me for years and yes, I know that not all challenges lead to victory, but I also want to recognize all of the developers who are being affected by this closure. Each and every one of them is a real person with a real life separate from our own and they have all put so much of their own passion into making this game. And I hope that they can be proud of what they did achieve. I know that I will always be proud and grateful to have worked with such a great team! A team that really punched above its weight class.

And what they achieved is truly remarkable. The early response from players when XDefiant launched was amazing—we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game! That is something to be extremely proud of, especially considering how tough this genre is. So, thank you to all of the developers who put their passion into making this game!

If there’s one thing, I hope we can all take away from this experience, it’s the importance of open, honest communication between developers and players. This “player-first” mentality along with respectful, non-toxic conversations between developers and players has been one of the standout differences that made XDefiant so special. From my very first post about XDefiant, this was the vision I wanted to champion, and I hope it leaves a positive mark on how the game industry treats its players and communities.

To our players, THANK YOU! From the bottom of my heart, I want to express my deepest gratitude for the incredible community that has grown around XDefiant. Your passion, creativity, and dedication have inspired us every step of the way.

With the utmost of love and respect,

Mark

It’s an unexpectedly sad day. This team really did try but as others have noted the game just had too many issues post launch, netcode being among the biggest. XDefiant really was the game I was hoping to main now that the content season for Modern Warfare 3 2023 was over and I could casually grind the rest of my camos and things and then just enjoy core TDM. I had planned to dive back into fighting games and more single player titles until XDefiant came along. I guess it’s back to that plan.

XDefiant was a fresh take not just on the FPS genre but on “hero shooters” in general. Hero Shooters aren’t something I usually enjoy but grounding it to the various Ubisoft franchises made it kind of accessible for me. I do think the choices of factions to ad in in seasons 1 and 2 were odd though. Why not do Assassin’s Creed early? I get the GSK and Highwaymen are probably well known, at least with the FPS crowd, but Assassin’s Creed is the much bigger title and honestly probably the only thing keeping Ubisoft afloat right now.

What’s especially frustrating about this is that, like Mark said, the team did remarkably well. One of the high points of this game was that for a game that was made from an engine that wasn’t made for shooters it played incredibly well. The team communicated with players constantly. There was no Skill or Engagement Based Match Making so games were organic. No background manipulation to artificially limit or boost you. Just a simple philosophy of “get good”, which is how I grew up playing online shooters and honestly how it should be. The battlepass seemed fair in that it progressed quickly and didn’t monopolize your time, making the game feel like a hobby as opposed to a job, which, again, is how it should be. As far as I’m concerned they did everything right.

At least we have until June to enjoy it and I, at least, plan to take advantage of that and enjoy it while it lasts.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger “Retires” ▉

Emma Smith, the Verge:

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired after over four decades at the company and stepped down from the board of directors effective December 1st, 2024. A report from Bloomberg says that after meeting with the board to discuss Intel’s progress in catching up with Nvidia and regaining lost market share, Gelsinger “was given the option to retire or be removed, and chose to announce the end of his career at Intel.”

Gelsinger rejoined Intel as CEO in February 2021, taking over from Bob Swan to turn around the already struggling chipmaker — an effort that hasn’t gone as planned. It’s largely missed out on the AI chip boom that fueled Nvidia’s rise, failed to launch new technology on schedule, struggled with recent CPU instability issues, and was skipped over as Microsoft’s launch partner for AI PCs.

It’s a shame to see Pat go as he was one of the engineers that had helped build Intel into the name it is today. The 80486 processor was amazing for it’s day and I actually had high hopes that he could trun the company around. Alder Lake (12th Gen) was a step in the right direction but Raptor Lake and it’s refresh were disappointments. So are the more current lineup of CPUs, especially Arrow Lake on the desktop.

It’s tough because I feel like Pat was given a really rough hand to play. When he came on board as CEO it was probably way too late to cancel 11th Gen Rocket Lake and the company was already heading towards dire straights. Add to this the disappointments that are 13th and 14th gen. I can see how these things add up.

Arrow Lake was supposed to be the beginning of a major core architecture change through Jim Keller’s Royal Core project, exploring things like Rentable Units, but that was cancelled and apparently broken out into smaller projects.

Thinking about this as I’m writing it, perhaps whoever is in charge of Intel next should give Keller a call. He’s worked at Apple, Tesla, and AMD and arguable saved AMD with the Zen series of processors.

Could Apple Circumvent Trumps Stupid Tariffs? ▉

From TechPowerUp:

TSMC has reportedly initiated production of Apple’s last-generation A16 Bionic processors at its newly constructed Fab 21 in Arizona. This development comes significantly earlier than anticipated, with the facility’s full-scale production initially scheduled for 2025. According to insights from industry expert Tim Culpan, the Arizona plant is already churning out a modest but noteworthy quantity of A16 Bionic chips. These processors are being manufactured using TSMC’s NP4 4 nm semiconductor node.

I had meant to link to this back in September but was dealing with some site issues and didn’t. Now I’ve found it again as I’m clearing out some old tabs and thought it relevant given the election last week.

If Apple can get at least some of their SoCs made here in the States, they may be able to make a case to the incoming Trump administration that they are at least making some things here and thus may be able to get exemptions to any proposed tariffs that might be imposed on electronics and/or chips being imported. If so, it’ll at least keep Apple’s prices stable. The problem is the A16 mentioned in the article is from the iPhone 15, not even the iPhone 15 Pro. I’m not sure if any of the 3 nm A series SoCs currently shipping in the iPhone 16 will be made in Arizona any time soon. This might extend to the M series SoCs as well.

That said I am so not looking forward to $2000 graphics cards again because a majority of my fellow Americans clearly failed basic high school economics and have absolutely no idea how tariffs actually work.

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2024 M4 Mac Mini Teardown Shows Just How Mini It Is ▉

The Mac Mini to me has always ben an impressive machine in that Apple has always been able to pack so much computer into such a tiny box. As much as I love my Macbook Pro, the Mini will always be my favorite. One of the interesting things about the Mini is that, for whatever reason, Apple lets users get away with making modifications. On my 2018 Mini they brought back the ability to upgrade the RAM, which I did. It seems on this one we might be able to upgrade the SSD. It’s not confirmed but iFixit has a short on YouTube channel where they say they were able to do it.

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“In Defeat: Defiance.” ▉

Bill Kristol, The Bulwark:

The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open.

Donald J. Trump will be our next president, elected with a majority of the popular vote, likely winning both more votes and more states than he did in his two previous elections. After everything—after his chaotic presidency, after January 6th, after the last year in which the mask was increasingly off, and no attempt was made to hide the extremism of the agenda or the ugliness of the appeal—the American people liked what they saw. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.

And Trump was running against a competent candidate who ran a good campaign to the center and bested him in a debate, with a strong economy. Yet Trump prevailed, pulling off one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history. Trump boasted last night, “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” and he’s not altogether wrong. […]

So: We can lament our situation. We can analyze how we got here. We can try to learn lessons from what has happened. We have to do all these things.

But we can’t only do those things. As Churchill put it: “In Defeat: Defiance.” We’ll have to keep our nerve and our principles against all the pressure to abandon them. We’ll have to fight politically and to resist lawfully. We’ll have to do our best to limit the damage from Trump. And we’ll have to lay the groundwork for future recovery.

To do all this, we’ll have to constitute a strong opposition and a loyal opposition, loyal to the Declaration and the Constitution, loyal to the past achievements and future promise of this nation, loyal to what America has been and should be.

And we’ll have to have the fortitude to say, ‘Yes, at times a majority of the American people can be wrong.’ That they were wrong on November 5, 2024. That vox populi is not vox Dei.

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Now What? ▉

David Frum, The Atlantic:

Donald Trump has won, and will become president for the second time. Those who voted for him will now celebrate their victory. The rest of us need to prepare to live in a different America: a country where millions of our fellow citizens voted for a president who knowingly promotes hatred and division; who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public; who plotted to overturn an election in 2020 and, had he not won, was planning to try again in 2024.

Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt. Over the past decade, opinion polls have showed Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country.

This was a clear and decisive election. In some ways, that’s a good thing because if they break it they own it.

Last night before the results came in I was nauseously optimistic. Donald Trump has a habit of over performing on election day even if he’s never really polled higher than 48%. What makes last night more of a gut punch than 2016 is that in 2016 we knew it would be bad but we hoped it wouldn’t be. That he would learn the office and what’s appropriate and what wasn’t. In 2024, we know exactly who he is. His first term was disastrous and I expect this one, with no one who knows better around to tell him “no”, to be even worse. Every bit of social progress we’ve made over the last 50 years about to be eroded.

I get it. Democracy is messy. This isn’t a disagreement on how to govern anymore. This is becoming a different country than the one I grew up in.

My generation was raised on the belief that America could always be counted upon to do the right thing, even if belatedly: reject the isolationism of America First and join the fight against Nazism; fund the Marshall Plan to stop communism; extend the promise of democracy to all people, without regard to race or sex. But maybe that belief was true only for a specific period, a unique moment. There were many chapters of history in which America did the wrong thing for years or decades. Maybe we are living through such a period now.

Or maybe the truth is that democracy is always a close-run thing, always in contention. If so, then we too must—as people in other failing democracies have learned to do—find new ways to champion wobbling institutions and threatened ideas. For supporters of the American experiment in liberal democracy, our only hope is education, organization, and the creation of a coalition of people dedicated to defending the spirit of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founders, the dream of freedom. More concretely: public civic-education campaigns to replace the lessons no longer taught in schools; teams of lawyers who can fight for the rule of law in courts; grassroots organizing, especially in rural and small-town America; citizens and journalists working to expose and fight the enormous wave of kleptocracy and corruption that will now engulf our political system.

Many of those shattered by this result will be tempted to withdraw into passivity—or recoil into performative radicalism. Reject both. We should focus, instead, on how to win back to the cause of liberal democracy a sufficient number of those Americans who voted for a candidate who denigrated this nation’s institutions and ideals.

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Kamala Harris Attended A Punk Show ▉

Eddie Fu at Consequence of Sound:

Vice President Kamala Harris is known for being a hip-hop, soul, and jazz fan, but now we know she has dabbled in punk rock on at least one occasion. In a recent interview with EFE, Harris’ younger cousin Sharada Balachandran Orihuela recalled the two of them attending a Bad Religion show in the early 2000s.

Orihuela’s father, Gopalan Balachandran, is Harris’ uncle on her mother’s side, meaning they share the same Indian grandparents. While growing up between Mexico and India, Orihuela became a big fan of Bad Religion but never went to one of their concerts.

This all changed when Orihuela moved to Oakland, California in 2001 to attend college. Orihuela went to live with her aunt (and Harris’ mother) Shyamala, allowing her to bond with her older cousin.

At the time, Harris was an assistant district attorney in San Francisco, but the future Democratic presidential nominee still put forth the effort to make Orihuela feel at home. “She was like a big sister to me,” Orihuela told EFE.

I’d be very curious to hear what she thought of the band. Bad Religion is a band that you can appreciate on the surface but being well read in things like philosophy and political philosophy gives their lyrics so much more depth when you understand what’s being said underneath. I’d suspect that, since she was assistant district attorney at the time, she was very well read in at least some of these areas.

This also speaks to her character. The fact that she took her niece to a show that was completely out of her depth tells me that she actually is a caring person and someone who cares more about others than herself. Contrast that to the asshole she’s running against.

I hope she ends up using one of their songs at a campaign event. Unlikely but you never know.

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Godspeed And Fare Thee Well AnandTech ▉

Ryan Smith breaking the news:

It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.

For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry.

A lot of things have changed in the last quarter-century – in 1997 NVIDIA had yet to even coin the term “GPU” – and we’ve been fortunate to watch the world of hardware continue to evolve over the time period. We’ve gone from boxy desktop computers and laptops that today we’d charitably classify as portable desktops, to pocket computers where even the cheapest budget device puts the fastest PC of 1997 to shame.

The years have also brought some monumental changes to the world of publishing. AnandTech was hardly the first hardware enthusiast website, nor will we be the last. But we were fortunate to thrive in the past couple of decades, when so many of our peers did not, thanks to a combination of hard work, strategic investments in people and products, even more hard work, and the support of our many friends, colleagues, and readers.

Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again. So, the time has come for AnandTech to wrap up its work, and let the next generation of tech journalists take their place within the zeitgeist.

I remember reading AnandTech back when I first started building PCs. AnandTech shutting down is a huge blow to the PC hardware community. Their reviews were always top notch and got tot he depths of places other reviews just don’t seem to have the stomach to go. AnandTech was one of the first places I checked for reviews of the 9950x.

My first PC was a Gateway 2000 machine sporting a Pentium 2 and, if memory serves, a whopping 64 MEGABYTES of RAM. It ran Windows 95 in a plain beige box. The best thing about it hardware wise was that it was sporting a Riva 128 “graphics accelerator” from a little known company called Nvidia. I was ordering what a friend of mine had essentially told me to get and when I mentioned the graphics the sales rep on the phone when ordering said “no you don’t want that, you want this” and it was the best upsell I think I’ve ever had. My grandparents bought that machine for me in late 1996, though it didn’t arrive until January of 97 but that machine was my gateway (no pun intended) into the world of PC Gaming and, little did I know, all the PC building, troubleshooting, and curiosity that comes with that.

I started reading them shortly after deciding it was time to replace that machine a few years later when I was building a machine around the upcoming Quake 3 Arena in the winter of 1999.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 27 years. In a way, I feel like I grew up with them even though I was 20 or so when I started this journey.

But Ryan also leaves us with a warning:

Finally, I’d like to end this piece with a comment on the Cable TV-ification of the web. A core belief that Anand and I have held dear for years, and is still on our About page to this day, is AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o’clock-news reporting. It has been our mission over the past 27 years to inform and educate our readers by providing high-quality content – and while we’re no longer going to be able to fulfill that role, the need for quality, in-depth reporting has not changed. If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.

For all the tech journalists out there right now – or tech journalists to be – I implore you to remain true to yourself, and to your readers’ needs. In-depth reporting isn’t always as sexy or as exciting as other avenues, but now, more than ever, it’s necessary to counter sensationalism and cynicism with high-quality reporting and testing that is used to support thoughtful conclusions. To quote Anand: “I don’t believe the web needs to be academic reporting or sensationalist garbage – as long as there’s a balance, I’m happy.”

Yes, times have changed. YouTube has grabbed people’s attention and while there are great YouTube channels for tech out there, there is also a lot of sensationalism on there as well as people make click bait titles and thumbnails for low value videos. Social Media makes it even worse as people argue for engagement.

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Great White Singer Jack Russell Dies At 63 ▉

TOMÁS MIER for Rolling Stone:

JACK RUSSELL, ONE of the founding members of Eighties band Great White, has died. He was 63. In a social media post Thursday, Russell’s family announced that the glam metal singer died “peacefully” surrounded by his family and friends. Russell died of Lewy body dementia and multiple system atrophy, his memoir co-author K.L. Doty confirmed to Rolling Stone.

“Jack is loved and remembered for his sense of humor, exceptional zest for life, and unshakeable contribution to rock and roll where his legacy will forever thrive,” read the statement. “His family asks for privacy at this time.”

The singer announced in July that he would be stepping away from touring due to his dementia and MSA diagnosis. “I am unable to perform at the level I desire and at the level you deserve,” Russell said at the time. “Words cannot express my gratitude for the many years of memories, love, and support.”

Yet another reminder of just how short and fragile life can be. One minute you’re fine and the next you aren’t. It’s also a reminder to not take everything so seriously and just enjoy what you can while you’re here.

Russell was born in Montebello, California, and was once the lead vocalist for the rock band Great White, which had its biggest hits “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” (a cover of the Ian Hunter song) and “The Angel Song” in the late Eighties. He co-founded the band in 1982 with Mark Kendall, and dropped several LPs, including 1987’s Once Bitten and 1989’s Twice Shy.

Great White was one of those 80’s bands that came along at the very end of the Hair Metal days. I had no idea that “Once Bitten” was a cover until just now. To me it was always one of those songs that renforces that Rock N’ Roll comes from the blues. It’s a hell of a cover to be sure and like all good covers takes the foundation of the original and adds to it in the band’s own way. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it makes the wheel better.

It’s also a great reminder that the 80’s really were a ton of fun even if you were just a kid.

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