The guy scours a lot of mailing lists and posts about small releases and such. There isn't much content, but I've had phoronix in my rss reader for the titles alone; it's nice to be informed about that stuff.
This is extremely incorrect. He built a test suite PTS to uncover kernel regression and is credited for atleast one major power regression discovery.
A lot of his articles are interpretive, but it's the best way to digest progress in the Linux world on everything ranging from kernel to hardware..which he often surfaces using git commits.
On ~95% of his articles there is extremely little content. It's usually copypastes of release notes and emails.
Yes, I'm aware there's excellent articles on performance tests and such. They are rare.
I have a lot of respect for Phoronix for the sheer amount of time the guy invests in it, but it is pageview driven because of its ads. I sent in a tip on his paypal because of this as I'm hopeful this move will encourage less fluff and more high quality content.
Sometimes he does quite good in-depth articles (such as his Talos Workstation preliminary benchmarks[1]) but mostly it's a nice site to avoid having to scour mailing lists to hear about cool new stuff.
Yeah, I've actually used it as my main source for keeping track of Mesa progress. It's really useful. It may sounds stupid, but I didn't know he had a "premium" version. I should send him some of the bitcoins I mined when you could still mine with CPUs...