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klelatti

"Of the 100+ customers, I'd say about a third of them are interested in that x86ish of our ecosystem," said Gelsinger.

Put another way two thirds are not interested in x86.

Sorry to say that this article reads like an Intel press release.

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A little more context here is needed I think

> One of the key elements of Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy is the company's newly created Intel Foundry Services (IFS) group that will manufacture chips for others. This group can operate as a classic foundry making any chips its clients want: Arm-based system-on-chips, RISC-V-based controllers, tensor processing units (TPUs), or graphics processing units (GPUs), just to name a few options.

> But Intel can naturally add a unique sauce to its IFS offering: highly competitive general-purpose x86 cores as well as an extremely broad portfolio of its silicon-proven IPs. Earlier this year Intel said that it was in discussion with over 100 of potential IFS customers and recently it revealed that about 1/3 of them were interested in custom x86-based SoCs.

> "Of the 100+ customers, I'd say about a third of them are interested in that x86ish of our ecosystem," said Gelsinger.

1/3 of _potential Intel foundry clients_ want x86. Of course there are plenty of companies investigating the new foundry option coming onboard with Samsung/TSMC lead times being what they are that have no interest in porting their products to x86.

Eh I could still see a ton of application specific customers that would stick with x86. HFT for example: if they can get a chip with a few super fast cores and HBM2 on substrate. Perhaps mix the NIC in and turn the entire thing into an SOC.

Yeah - sounds like probably around 40 customers wanting stuff like that. No one's saying otherwise.

I think we have to apply an appropriate degree of scepticism to these statements. ‘Are interested’ could have a broad range of meanings from happy to receive a presentation from Intel sales upwards. ‘Want’ sounds like they are keen to have x86. Given x86 is supposed to be a key part of their offering I think they would have been more positive if they could.

> Put another way two thirds are not interested in x86.

We aren't talking about Intel's customers in general, but those who are using or planning to use Intel's new fab services. In other words, 1/3 of those interested in creating their own chip are also interested in custom x86 design.

> Sorry to say that this article reads like an Intel press release.

This isn't an article but an interview with Intel's CEO. As Intel officially as it gets

It’s not an interview with Intel’s CEO. It’s an article about Intel seemingly informed by the CEO’s interview with a third party. It has lots of apparently TH commentary on Intel vs AMD vs Arm etc. So we should judge it on those terms and on those terms it’s incredibly one sided.

Tomshardware has a history of being basically that, a mouthpiece for Intel. Back in the days of AMDs thunderbird, opteron, etc., I remember tomshardware having some obvious bias that made other outlets like anandtech look super trustworthy by comparison.

Sources for this? I’ve followed Tom’s Hardware for a number of years and they’ve been blasting intel pretty hard lately for their failure to provide competitive offerings in the last gen or two of CPUs:

1. https://www.tomshardware.com/features/amd-vs-intel-cpus

2. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-performance-cpus,5...

Not blasting Intel for their recent failures would lose them all credibility. Note my claim was just that historically they have a pro Intel bias. It's tough to dig up stuff from well over a decade ago.

Here's a passing reference to what I think is the same scandal I was thinking of, at least:

https://hardforum.com/threads/warm-dual-core-opteron-165-new...

It's not hard to find discussion of other cases of bias:

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/posts/32078480

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a87Iy7avG7o

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to find better sources. You can make up your own mind, but I don't trust them to be impartial.

Fair points, and thanks for the references--I'd rather know about bias than not.

Purch (TH's owner) talking about the relationship between Intel and TH: http://archive.is/9oxp2

Plenty of people agreeing with me on various forums: https://www.google.com/search?q=tomshardware+biased+-inurl%3...

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