Back in early 2000s Charlie was a beat reporter for The Inquirer. The Inquirer was written like a British tabloid (in fact they were split from The Register.)

Back in early 2000s Charlie was a beat reporter for The Inquirer. The Inquirer was written like a British tabloid (in fact they were split from The Register.) As for his grudge, it probably stem from Intel's underhanded tactics. AMD had the Athlon XP that buried Intel's Pentium 4 in every measure. Intel made some very backhanded and immoral moves- * Bribed Dell to not use AMD * Threatened Taiwanese mobo manufacturers to not build Athlon mobo by withholding North bridge chips * Blackmailed the said manufacturers to not even show up for product conventions held by AMD * Forced RAMBUS down everyone's throat until Athlon forced them to release the i815 chipset (finally supports DDR1!) As a result AMD never managed to grow their revenue to a level that can sustain their R&D. When the Intel's Core arch arrived 4 years later it was over for AMD. The Inquirer had a lot of contacts that suffered greatly, and it must have left quite an impression on Charlie. I remember that one of his reports was that during a trade show, a Taiwanese mobo rep had to meet Charlie in secret in a hotel room to talk about AMD, in fear of Intel catching wind and retaliate. BTW Charlie also has a grudge against Nvidia for similar reasons, but Nvidia has been competent enough for the last decade that Charlie couldn't find anything to complain about.