iOS 14 App Library isn’t useful at all

We got App Library feature months ago, almost a year ago actually with release of iOS 14. And now that I’ve been living with it for all this time, I realized it’s not all that great. Sure, it holds your apps that you removed from home screens, similarly like App Drawer does on Android, but what really doesn’t help are actually its categories. Every time I need to run an app that I don’t have on any of the home screens, I have to go to App Library and then dig through categories where you can’t really be sure where app will be placed within many categories.

Like for example, “Reddit” is in “Information & Reading” instead in “Social”. Why? Or how Apple’s own translation app is in “Information & Reading”, but Microsoft’s Translator app is in “Productivity & Finance”. Others are for the most part in correct categories, but still. That’s not helping.

Then there is the fact it displays categories with 3 apps with big icons and 4th opens up the rest that aren’t listed there which takes additional time of your attention to figure whether you have it there in big icon or you have to expand the category. Even more so because the big icons have no text labels so you have to entirely depend on recognizing them through icon.

Every time I need to got o App Library I notice I’m spending too much time looking for app that I want which I think it’s the opposite of what it should App Library be doing. Which is make faster access to apps.

What I prefer more is actually the alphabetically ordered app list with alphabet index on the side for quick jump that you can access by pulling the screen down when on App Library main screen.

This here is so much more convenient. I already know the first letter of an app because of what its name is which means I already roughly know where it should be. And instead of scrolling through entire list, you just drag finger over the alphabet index on the right side and it instantly jumps to that letter.

It’s by far the fastest method to find an app. I even hate Android’s grid ordered App Drawers because they are not easy to find apps in. Lists in alphabetical order with index are the shit.

Main issue here is that on iOS 14, there is just TOO MANY steps to reach the list view. I have 2 home screens and third is the App Library. So I have to swipe to the side twice to reach App Library. Then I need to swipe down and then I get the list view.

Why not be able to select default view for the App Library? So that when you reach the App Library it would already be in the list view by default. I’d very much prefer that.

Instead, I often just drag the screen down on my home screens to see Siri suggestions and app that I want is probably already there. Or I just use search there to look up for the app by searching for it. Which kinda defeats the purpose of the fancy App Library. It’s really just a holding bin for all the apps you don’t use and nothing else. It could be better and more useful than that…

Why Firefox is still a great browser in 2021

I see A LOT of hate for Firefox in recent years and while I do hate some things Mozilla does to Firefox and all that, the fact is, Firefox is still the most versatile browser available across all the platforms you can imagine and it’s fully open source too. And it has quite some pretty cool and unique features not found in any other browser. Lets check out few of them that I can’t live without and them being entirely absent in other browsers makes me not want to use those browsers. In fact, it just makes me confused how people prefer dumb Chrome so much when it has none of this cool stuff that makes browsing the web such pleasant experience.

Super customizable interface

Despite all the hate new Proton interface design gets, Firefox is the only browser that allows you to move actual browser elements like buttons and fields around. Granted, it used to be far more customizable in the past where you could literally move ANY browser button or element anywhere, but being able to move around bookmarks bar, search bar, as well as ANY button almost anywhere you want or even remove them entirely is pretty cool and unique. Only browser that comes anywhere close is Vivaldi, but you can’t move stuff around in real-time, you have to dig settings for all of it through main settings which is clumsy and still limited.

Just right click on empty part of tab bar on top and select “Customize Toolbar…”. You can also remove things from interface by right clicking on nearly any button or element and selecting “Remove from Toolbar”. All removed elements are stored in “Customize Toolbar…” menu from where you can just drag them back where you want them if you desire to do so.

Here are some examples of what you can do…

Better extensions

Firefox was one of the first if not actually the first browsers to offer extensions. These small addons allow you to add extra functionality to browser that doesn’t come out of the box with the browser. And from my experience of using them for many many years, Firefox still has one of the best selections of extensions. And not just that, for some reason extensions in Firefox always feel like they are more polished and done better even if they are the same extensions that are also found in Opera, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi and Chrome. They just work better and have less of dumb restrictions as well as just not being so hungry on the memory. And what I like the most, it’s up to YOU if you want them to be visible or not in toolbars and where you want to have them exactly. All other browsers have this stupid dedicated “Addons/extensions” button in the dedicated extension bar that’s always in the browser main toolbar whether you like it or not and it just hides extensions within it, if you don’t want to have their actual extension icons in the toolbar. Well, since Firefox interface is almost fully customizable, you can not only hide extension icons entirely, you can actually move them pretty much anywhere you want. Do you want some extension’s icon to be in the tab bar? You can drag it there if you want. Do you  want it on the left side next to Back/Forward, Refresh and Home buttons? Yes, you can put it there. Do you want it between Back and Forward buttons? Just drag it there! Or you can just remove it entirely from the interface and it’ll keep on working behind the scenes and not be visible to you at all. And because Mozilla is not money grabbing corporation like Google, they don’t do dumb shit like removing API’s that are required for Adblockers to work correctly and efficiently, meaning extensions often have more power to manipulate webpages than in other Chrome based browsers unless its developers specifically ignore Google’s idea of web and still allow it. Which requires extra effort and time on their side, meaning they might not always do it.

Super portable

You can grab portable version of Firefox from here. While some other browsers offer similar thing, they are for the most part super clumsy to work with and often don’t auto update which makes them really annoying to maintain. Not so much Firefox Portable. It’s super flexible and it’ll work almost in any way you can imagine or hack yourself. You can even simply extract installer files obtained from Mozilla’s FTP and drop them into portable folder if you want to use latest version, but you don’t want to wait for auto updater to pick it up which usually takes a day or two after it lands on FTP. Or convert stable version of Firefox Portable into a Nightly. And it’ll just work. It’s just cool and gives flexibility to more advanced users.

Reliable sync across all devices

My biggest issue with most other browsers is their stupid selective option to sync bookmarks, history and other stuff across devices. Chrome works for a while, but other browsers were and still are a total mess. Brave had syncing problems for months and have just fixed it recently to finally be able to sync across all devices and it’s still very glitchy and I had to rename folders and move them around after importing for it to start syncing them. Vivaldi for example doesn’t even have an iOS version yet which makes it a no go entirely. Opera, used to have fully working sync in iOS via Opera Mini and ever since they sacked it years ago, there is just nothing. On iOS, Opera Touch (now renamed to Opera Browser) only has useless MyFlow which sounds like an app to track your period and acts like a one way messenger where you send yourself snippets of things, but you can’t sync bookmarks between all devices and always have them at hand. Ridiculous and retarded beyond belief.

Very flexible bookmarks

While we all take bookmarks for granted these days, there is still an issue with how most browsers want to shove all the bookmarks in your face and only allow you to have them fully visible. All of them. Or they are super clumsy to work with bookmarks because they behave like a webpage instead of a proper list selection like in Firefox. It’s just so much easier to copy, move, delete or even mass select bookmarks because all the commands like Ctrl+A to select all bookmarks in your view works so flawlessly. Vivaldi was a nightmare to work with as it was so stubborn with insisting its own weird ways of what’s Bookmarks bar and didn’t obey what I wanted, Brave is still all buggy and allows you to Copy or Cut bookmarks using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+X, but then doesn’t allow you to paste it with Ctrl+V for some dumb reason and you need to use right click context menu instead to paste them. WTF!? Or most often than not, when you hit Ctrl+A and it just selects entire window, including menus and buttons of the bookmarks manager, not just the actual bookmark entries inside of it. I hate that so much. It’s insane how something as simple as bookmarks management is done so idiotically and super clumsy in all other browsers, but just works right in Firefox.

In addition to that, Firefox segments bookmarks into 4 separate groups for additional organizing so you always know where things are exactly and you’re not forced to use them if you don’t want to, even though they are fixed there and can’t be deleted as such. These groups are:

• Bookmarks Toolbar
• Bookmarks Menu
• Other Bookmarks
• Mobile Bookmarks

Bookmarks Toolbar is meant to keep most regularly used bookmarks right in front of you at all times. Be it as separate bookmarks or even neatly organized in subfolders if you have tons of them.

Bookmarks Menu is dedicated folder for an extra button with same name that you can find when right clicking tab bar and selecting “Customize Toolbar…” It gives access to all bookmarks, but you can also put bookmarks in it to give them a focus in this button. Especially if you disable Bookmarks bar entirely and you use Bookmarks Menu button to access the bookmarks directly. Since I don’t use this category I just use it to store bookmarks that I don’t want to come up in any other menu. For example bookmarks to my favorite extensions and all the custom keywords and search engines stored as bookmarks, that I’ll talk about more in few moments…

Other Bookmarks can be used for bookmarks that you want to have stored, but you don’t want them visible at all times. You can enable or disable Other Bookmarks button in the Bookmarks Toolbar too if you wish. I mostly use this one for unsorted stuff. Like, when you are browsing around and you just click the star button in the URL bar to quickly save a bookmark without much hassle and you’ll check it out later. You know, all the misc bookmarks that you don’t want in front of you, but you want them there. And you have them separate from the rest so there is no mistake what they are.

Mobile Bookmarks is reserved for bookmarks saved on your mobile device that is then synced across all your devices. You can freely move bookmarks in it or from it depending on where you want them. But it’s a dedicated section so you always know it was bookmarked on your mobile device which helps with organizing of bookmarks.

Custom keyword searches and syncing of keywords and search engines

Another cool feature I can’t live without are keywords and custom searches. While some other browsers have search keywords and allow adding custom searches, NONE of them allows syncing of all this. After years of use you can create tons of custom keywords and search engines for various things and it really sucks hard having to re-do them every time you reinstall browser or operating system. And you have to re-do them on all your systems. Well, Firefox doesn’t have this issue and you can not only store keywords and custom search engines within bookmarks, because you can do so, they can actually get synced across all devices. Add custom search on one system and it’ll sync to all systems within the sync you’re using. And they are super useful.

Keywords can be any word or even a single or two letters. You use DuckDuckGo, but need Google as fallback anyway? Set “g” keyword for Google search and you can type search terms directly into URL bar with keyword in the front and it’ll search that word directly in that search engine. For example “g geforce rtx 3080” and it’ll automatically search for “geforce rtx 3080” using Google Search. Assuming you set a keyword for it beforehand (some are included by default which you can see or change in Firefox Search settings). You need to use dictionary regularly because you’re not a native English speaker? Set “d” as keyword for dictionary.com and you can type “d intriguing” into URL bar and it’ll look up “intriguing” directly in dictionary.com webpage. It’s so cool you don’t even need a dedicated search field anymore in the interface.

The above is example that I made for Geizhals.eu which is one of my favorite sites to search for good prices on tech stuff in Europe. I don’t have to open webpage first via bookmark and then manually search in it. I just type keyword and what I want to search for into URL bar and it opens up the webpage and already searches for the word I was looking for. It’s insanely convenient and fast and I can’t imagine searching online without this anymore. You can do this to any search engine or webpage that has search field and it’s ridiculously fast and convenient and because it can be synced across your devices you don’t have to manually add all of this for every webpage on every system. It works even on mobile versions of Firefox as it syncs keywords and search engines there too. Example above stored the keyword bookmark into bookmark toolbar. If you don’t want it visible there just move it to Other Bookmarks folder and it’ll still sync across devices as bookmark, but won’t be in your view all the time.

It sounds super complicated and like it requires a lot of effort, but it’s actually really simple and I guarantee, you won’t be able to browse the web without it anymore.

Super customizable and tweakable

While there were changes and limitations to ways how you can modify or tweak Firefox, it’s still browser that gives you the most freedom. We already talked about interface itself in the beginning, but there is more! Either by countless official settings found in Settings menu to bunch of hidden settings and tweaks under about:config menu (just type “about:config” without quotes into the URL bar and slam ENTER). Chrome based browsers also have a similar thing under about:flags, but the stuff there is next to useless as it’s just bunch of very gimmicky settings that don’t really affect much of anything. In Firefox however, you can change some pretty dramatic things with it.

Want to enable experimental features like new rendering engines or multi-process subsystems before they are officially supported? You can do that. Do you hate how all browsers close entirely when you close the last tab? I know I fucking hate that dumb shit and only way to fix that in most Chrome based browsers is to use extensions which all behave like some half baked hack. You can adjust that too in about:config. Want to have HTTPS padlock icon in green instead of default grey? Bam, you can do that too. Not using Pocket, screen capture tool or Developer tools? You can fully disable all this too. Not using Sync feature? You can entirely disable and remove that from menus too using single setting in about:config! Possibilities are almost endless for as long as Mozilla doesn’t hardcode a feature and can’t be changed at all. And while there are some such settings, most of them allow tweaking that other browsers just don’t have.

And if about:config just feels way too overwhelming with its endless parameters that you have no clue what they even do, well, I got you covered with that too with my Firefox Tweaker tool. You can grab it here on my blog. It’s a tweaking tool that allows you to adjust curated set of tweaks and settings using relatively simple interface where you tick few checkboxes and you’re done. All accompanied with simplified names and descriptions what they do. And if you mess it up, you can always restore it back to default if you wish in few clicks.

Powerful Tracking Protection built-in

Mozilla has been aggressively pushing anti-tracking features and Firefox is loaded with them. And while they are not full on adblocking features because they still believe ads can be beneficial part of the web to keep it free, they don’t agree with tracking methods used by advertisers. Built-in anti-tracking tech is pretty powerful and they made pretty big advancements to keep users safe from trackers and not break webpages while doing that.

Performance

People still often complain how Firefox is so much slower than Chrome based browsers. But I’m not sure where people are getting these metrics from. Sure, in all pure JavaScript/WebAssembly benchmarks it’s slower, but on real webpages that are a mix of all sorts of things, I honestly cannot see any difference. Common webpages that tend to be slow are slow in both, Firefox and Brave, even though Brave scores almost 2x points in all these benchmarks. There will always be webpages that might work faster in one and slower in other and vice versa. But I’ve never encountered any huge gaps between them.

And this is experience from variety of systems. I use a really low end ASUS Transformer netbook with Atom CPU, 2GB RAM and slow eMMC storage. I also use it on decent but already somewhat aged laptop with AMD Ryzen 2500U, 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. I also use it on a high end system with AMD Ryzen 5800X, 32GB RAM and 2TB SSD. It works great within expectations for given system.

Verdict

Sure, there is plenty of things to hate about Firefox that are legit criticism, but there is also a lot of really cool things that are not found in ANY other browser or it’s present in very limited way or functionality. It’s actually so bad that even though I had a point where I said I’m done with Firefox and then realized all other browsers suck way harder. Just speed means nothing if I’m forced into doing things their way instead of browser adapting to my needs and Firefox just does that way better to a point I’m willing to forgive it occasional hiccups or dumb Mozilla’s design decisions, because I can for the most part revert them or change them. And in all honesty, I’ve been using Firefox since it’s very early versions (we’re talking before 1.0 here, the 0.x betas!) and I never actually had really huge problems with it.

This isn’t sponsored post or me being a fanboy of Firefox. It’s really the opposite. I hate tons of things that Mozilla does and its stupid fanbase defends. But ultimately, at the end of the day I despise Chrome even more and I can’t wrap my head around the fact it has like 80% market share. It’s the dumbest, most locked down and useless browser I’ve seen in my life and its only highlight is integration of Google’s crap people absolutely adore for some reason and raw speed in heavy JavaScript benchmarks. But function wise it’s pure garbage that needs billion extensions to be half useful and they just turn it into a fat sloth. Despite everything, Firefox is more flexible and can be twisted and tweaked more to serve me well. It’s why I stick with it and why I even developed Firefox Tweaker for it.

So, if you’re with Chrome because you know nothing else because everyone is raving about stupid Chrome everywhere, give Firefox a try. You might be intrigued by how flexible Firefox is.

Download Firefox

AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution got tested and how everyone missed its point entirely

AMD officially launched FidelityFX Super Resolution or “FSR” in short and everyone rushed analyzing and reviewing it. However, after watching several reviews, I’ve noticed a trend of how everyone missed the entire point of FSR. Let me explain why and how…

What everyone did was to grab a very high end graphic card aka Radeon RX 6800XT, strapped 4K rendered games to it and fired away into pixel hunting mode. And that’s the whole problem. Granted, there  are scenarios where you need extra horsepower for 4K in games like Cyberpunk 2077 with every setting maxed out, but where FSR is most welcome and wanted is on the other end of the spectrum. People running Radeon RX 580’s for example.

When you have a low(er) end card, your options are very limited. To make framerate higher you need to lower resolution or start lowering graphics settings. And this has two issues. Lowering resolution means it’ll really look like turd because the upscaling monitor does is probably one of the worst methods available which is why everyone recommends using native monitor resolution and lowering resolution without FSR also turns HUD elements into a complete poop. Just imagine how HUD elements looked like at 720p or even less on a 1080p monitor? And lowering graphics settings means you’re effectively removing visual elements. Disabling HBAO or shadows has huge visual degradation involved. Also problem with these settings is that they may give you a 20fps boost or 1fps boost. You almost can’t be sure unless you trial and error and watch framerate. Changing resolution is very linear thing. The amount of pixels you take away or add pretty much linearly scales in either direction.

I watched Digital Foundry’s review as well as TechPowerUp where they actually also tested on Radeon RX580 and it’s the best indication of what I mean.

Not even going crazy, using 1440p which is very common resolution these days, RX580 has the following performance (estimated because TechPowerUps graphs aren’t super exact).

ANNO 1800
Native: 23 fps
FSR Performance: 48 fps

Godfall
Native: 36 fps
FSR Performance: 65 fps

Kingshunt
Native: 40 fps
FSR Performance: 65 fps

Terminator Resistance
Native: 45 fps
FSR Performance: 95 fps

You may notice I skipped Riftbreaker entirely. That’s because the game runs at 100fps at native 1440p resolution. There is no point in using FSR here.

So, when you can preserve all the effects, crisp HUD and turn framerate from barely playable to very much playable, you’re much easier to forgive some shimmering or loss of general detail. You know, opposed to not having shadows where they should be or shading and lighting just not being there entirely opposed to being a bit more fuzzy. I still need to try it myself in motion opposed to side by side screenshots, but even Performance mode which is the worst possible doesn’t look that bad when you’re desperate.

Or you can even combine some stuff. Maybe drop settings you know don’t make much visual difference but do with performance. And pair it with FSR Ultra Quality. You might create good gains with minimal loss in quality. And when you need to pixel hunt differences, it means FSR is doing its job quite well.

FSR is no magic bullet, but given how simple it’s apparently to incorporate into games (someone did it in 2 hours from what I heard), it’s a nice addition I’d say and it’ll give people more options to enjoy games when not having enough horsepower, but don’t quite want to sacrifice graphic effects in their entirety. I think it’s great.

Bizarre drive buttons placement in electric cars

Since electric cars are all the rage these days I’ve noticed a particularly bizarre design decision when it comes to electric cars. In nearly all electric cars they have this really bizarre and illogical placement of drive buttons (Drive, Reverse, Neutral, Park etc).

Here is an example from Hyundai Ioniq Electric (2017, but they haven’t changed it for 2019 models either)…

You can argue that they are meaningfully ordered and designed so you have palm/wrist resting on the leather pad and you have access to all buttons at once…

But why is DRIVE button on the left, REVERSE button on the right, PARK “in the front” and NEUTRAL “in the back”?

Wouldn’t linear placement in the direction of car driving and position make more sense? DRIVE in the front facing the hood, because that’s the direction you’ll be driving. Forward. NEUTRAL still in the front because it’s used to just roll forward with no resistance. PARK to the rear and REVERSE all the way in the back facing boot, because that’s the direction you’ll be going if selected. It’s a natural order with directions you’ll be going when selected.

Hell, even such placement would make more sense…

Same arrangement, with different button placement. Drive and Reverse in front and back and Park and Neutral on the sides with Park on driver side because you’ll be using it more and Neutral to the right because you’ll be using it less.

I know you can argue that it doesn’t matter and it’s a petty thing, but I’ve seen a new Peugeot 208 Electric having shifter lever almost like in petrol cars with old sequential shifter, but with drive modes INVERTED! Drive was pulling lever to the back of the car. Reverse was pushing the lever to the front. WHY? I see people getting confused with pedals and gears in petrol cars, ramming them through store fronts and into pools and you’d expect they’d strive for simplicity and natural logical order with EV’s, but they instead opted for this illogical unnatural order.

The palm rest in Hyundai is silly, electric cars don’t require you to hold the hand over shifter, because they don’t have any gears. You don’t need arrangement around the palm rest. So why not do it linearly or even with same arrangement, but with drive direction placement of buttons instead of just tossing them in there?

I’m not hating on Hyundai in particular, I actually really like Hyundai as a brand because they have really good unpretentious cars, but this really bothered me and I’ve noticed other EV’s do the same weird thing…

Alcon AOSept Plus with HydraGlide lens solution causing foggy vision

I can’t believe Alcon hasn’t addressed this for years now. I’ve heard some reports from users ages ago that peroxide solution AOSept Plus with HydraGlide causes foggy vision. And I said, maybe it’s just in their case. Until I tried it anyway myself and I got exactly the same results. Foggy vision no matter what lenses I was using. Gave it to a relative to try and got the same results.

Read about it some more and even more people were reporting same thing. And what has Alcon done? Nothing. The damn thing is still selling like all is fine. The version without HydraGlide was fine, but it’s next to impossible to get now because everyone is selling the HydraGlide version. Only peroxide solution sold where I live is EasySept from Bausch & Lomb, but it costs 5€ more per bottle for same amount which is very annoying and very significant. But it doesn’t cause foggy vision so that’s what I’m forced to use now.

I’d like to hear more about this from users and would be also nice to hear what Alcon has to say about it. If they even have anything to say at all…

Microsoft Outlook webmail needs per alias names

Microsoft’s Outlook (webmail) offers creation of aliases. Which is great. You have your base e-mail and you may want to create new e-mail addresses within it without having to create whole new Outlook e-mail account and all the e-mails to all aliases are sent and received under single mailbox.

All great till this point. Problem is, for some silly reason, Microsoft decided to allow aliases, but sticks your name to all of them.

So, if your name is “John Smith” and that’s what you have set in Microsoft Account, the sent e-mail address to the recipient will look like this:

John Smith <john.smith@outlook.com>

But then, if you create an alias “sheepmaster@outlook.com”, the e-mail address will look like this:

John Smith <sheepmaster@outlook.com>

As you can see, by creating an alias, you’ve created a new e-mail address, but Outlook webmail, for some silly reason doesn’t allow you to change the name in front. So, what’s the point of alias when it sticks your real name to it regardless.

And to make things even worse, it strictly has to be NAME and SURNAME. You can’t even make an anon e-mail with just your single word nickname. Nope, can’t be done at all. Two words, name and surname.

Microsoft really needs to rethink the design of this. It has the aliases there, but they messed them up entirely so they don’t really make any sense or use. Was even thinking of buying the Office 365 package, but this was a show stopper really. I need entirely separate aliases, one with real name for professional use and one made up for goofing around on the interwebs.

Solderless CPU protector IHS/shroud

So, I was thinking about this. We used to have naked CPU cores back in the past and one of the reasons why everyone started doing IHS (Integrated Heat Spreader) wasn’t really to spread heat as much as to protect the CPU core from chipping on the edges when mounting and dismounting CPU coolers and not placing it absolutely flush caused higher pressure on edges of CPU core, chipping it as a result. I remember my AMD Athlon XP 2400+ having edges chipped a bit after many mountings of CPU coolers. It was still working, but it looked a bit ugly and such chipping can possibly ruin it.

The main problem doing this are thermals. Ideal method of removing heat from CPU is having heatsink attached to it directly with highest heat conductive thermal compound in between.

With IHS, you’re essentially making a sandwich of materials and bonding compounds that are far from optimal. Sure, IHS can be copper which has excellent thermal conductivity, but bonding compounds usually aren’t. Even gallium used in liquid metal compounds has like over 10x lower heat conductivity than copper. And soldering IHS to CPU can cause the solder compound to crack in rare cases as it’s constantly expanding and shrinking as CPU is heating up and cooling down rather rapidly.

So, Intel started using regular thermal “bonding” compound even under the IHS where it’s contacting CPU. Sure they saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they also made CPU’s with absolutely atrocious thermals. This isn’t really an issue with low end CPU’s that barely get warm under load, but 12 or 16 core CPU can’t possibly work well.

I got this idea while looking at the other segment, GPU’s. GPU’s still have core die fully exposed. Partially because heatsinks always come pre-installed by manufacturer and partially, because they do a small trick that I think could be borrowed by Intel and AMD for CPU’s. Sort of proposal of 2 designs quickly mocked in Paint 3D…

This one is borrowed directly from graphic cards. GPU’s have been using metal guard shrouds like this for ages and what these do is prevent placement of heatsink at an angle that is too high which is what causes the edge chipping. And given we can make chips at 7nm, I’m pretty sure they can manufacture whole CPU’s in such way that CPU core and metal guard shroud are perfectly flush, meaning shroud and CPU would be perfectly leveled on the package substrate. Shouldn’t be a problem even for multicore designs like Ryzen or EPYC. They would have to tighten up tolerances, but in the end, it would actually end up being easier than having to perfectly solder 4 or more individual chips to the IHS on top.

This second example was actually my initial “proposed” design, but I later figured out there would be issues with such design, mostly in terms of material used if solid and bending issues if hollow. Also, thermal compound would get stuck into thin crevice between guard and CPU as well as issues where liquid metal would potentially get inside and no way of cleaning it out. Filling the crevice with some sort of epoxy would complicate expansion of metals and core and I don’t think it would be a good solution.

So, I think the first one would work better, be able to protect the naked CPU core and be easy to maintain in terms of cleaning thermal compound.

I think heading in this direction is a necessity because we are increasing cores with each CPU release and having them under several layers of suboptimal heat conductive materials is a really bad design decision as thermals are getting worse and worse with every CPU release. “Heat spreader” should be a copper base of the CPU heatsink or water block, not an extra layer of copper between two layers of thermal compound which is just terrible.

Having fully exposed CPU gives you best way of removing heat and metal guard would prevent chipping of CPU die. Probably not 100%, but enough to allow several re-mounts of CPU without any damage.

I really hope AMD and Intel will consider heading in this direction because CPU’s in general look pretty terrible these days in terms of thermals…