To expand on what others said, there has been tons of corporate dysfunction at Intel.
Some hardware efforts have gone pretty well, and had decent long-term trajectories but were sabotaged by direction changes or early cuts from up high. There seems to be some corporate "game of thrones" going on between branches too, and a lot of redundancy on the software dev side.
AMD has a similar issue actually, and it's starting to bite, especially on the GPU side.
The ideal state is some kind of bastardized hybrid, federally funded and guided but still private.
This is how TSMC rose.
It's also kinda how Samsung Foundry exists, with how Samsung is so giant and tied to SK politics that's it blurs the line with the govt.
Trump is going in the opposite direction unfortunately, regulating the shit out of them in terms of policy (tariffs, politics), yet yanking grants and "freeing" the government of them.
their new datacenter hardware is hyper tuned for LLMs at the expense of general compute, unlike AMD
This is not true. The AMD MI300X/MI325X are, if anything, even more tuned for AI. They're missing ROPs when Nvidia's datacenter GPUs (last I checked) still have them.
...And honestly the demand for datacenter GPUs outside of AI is pretty small, anyway.
Also, CUDA has always been and will be the dominant compute API.
I'm not trying to shill Nvidia here. Screw them. The MI cards are better hardware anyway, just with a worse and (ironically) more AI specialized software stack that has utterly sabotaged them.
GPUs are also not really taking off.
Arc Battlemage was great, albeit late. Not cutting the big die and sticking with it one more generation, they would have been golden.
Falcon shores seems like a management disaster, yeah...
On the CPU side, they still sell a ton of laptop CPUs, and some efforts like the small-core server CPUs are competitive.
Intel was not toast, they just need to stop the corporate dysfunction and stick with some efforts. But it seems they can't even manage that.
Oh, heavens, I can only imagine what crapware OEMs would cook up with full access to the OS…
How would you like 11 gigabytes of junkware in your kernel? That only works on that version? Oh, and your computer won’t work without it.
Meta pays for PyTorch development as well!
Llama.cpp will be fine of course, it technically has nothing to do with Meta.
But yeah, it’s mostly disappointing IMO…
And kinda stupid. These are literally experimental models; they release one experiment with mixed results, and admittedly catastrophically marketing for it, and Zuck pulls the rug?
My impression was that Meta's backing out of Llama LLMs anyway, to focus on “products”
Mmmmmmmm...
What about continuing the Dominion thread? I am wide open to ideas there, but shapeshifters would both be awesome in modern CG and awesome as officers.
Pop sci-fi seems to be fond of intermediate-mass black holes (EG Interstellar, Star Trek StrangeNew Worlds), and for something kinda the size of a star, they are "scary."
In other instances (like in TV Foundation), a close orbit to the accretion disk is a source of suspense.
And then there's the "stealth" aspect. Stellar-mass ones and below are very small and (potentially) quiet for something with the mass of a star, eg easy to stumble upon.
And in some very advanced universes (eg the online Orion's Arm), even with "hard" sci fi, swimming through a star's nuclear plasma is totally doable. But a black hole is an impossible boundry of physics, and an particularly extreme object useful for astroengineering.
Ah, right!
I'll also add that Enterprise is pretty 'standalone' too. It's not like how Voyager and DS9 directly continue TNG's politics/characters; you can go back and watch it later. You can watch other series without missing much from Enterprise.
If I were you, I'd watch Picard as "scenery change" to modern, high res, serial Star Trek, while all those characters and plots are still fresh. Call it a breather after your Voyager marathon, and a farewell VOY, DS9, and TNG, as it's basically built on Voyager and TNG lore.
Then I'd go back to classic, more episodic ST and watch Enterprise.
I dunno about movies, as I am not an expert on those (and which ones are good or not).
Obviously make sure you have watched DS9, the best Star Trek (fight me!).
Star Trek: Enterprise is not bad like the internet would lead you to believe. I say watch it, and skip around if you find you don't like it. But if you watched all of Voyager, I think you will like all of Enterprise.
...But if you skip it... hmm. Chronologically and character-wise (other than movies) ST Picard seems like the next step. It kinda 'picks up' from where TNG and Voyager left off. Discovery and SNW are more standalone.
This is one of the "smartest" models you can fit on a 24GB GPU now, with no offloading and very little quantization loss. It feels big and insightful, like a better (albeit dry) Llama 3.3 70B with thinking, and with more STEM world knowledge than QwQ 32B, but comfortably fits thanks the new exl3 quantization!
You need to use a backend that support exl3, like (at the moment) text-gen-web-ui or (soon) TabbyAPI.
Ah. You can still run them in exllamav2, but you're probably better off with ik_llama.cpp then:
https://github.com/ikawrakow/ik_llama.cpp
It supports special "KT" quantizations, aka trellis quants similar to exllamav3, and will work with vulkan (or rocm?) on your 6800.
Quantizing yourself is not too bad, but if you want, just ping me, and I can make some 16GB KT quants, or point you to how to do it yourself.
It's also a good candidate for Qwen3 30B with a little CPU offloading. ik_llama.cpp is specifically optimized for MoE offloading.