Let me give you an example. If Cisco ever wanted to use the atom core in a product, today they would be limited to buying a fully packaged discrete part from Intel. This part may not be 100% ideal for the application but Cisco will have to live with it because Intel will not customize the part unless you are a marque customer (think Apple) or are buying in huge volumes (think Apple).

By licensing the core design to Cisco, Intel is effectively handing over the design and packaging to Cisco. Cisco will have a lot of flexibility in say the package dimension, the speed of the part (low power/low speed vs high power/high speed), etc, etc, etc. And Intel will not have to go through the hassle of tailoring the part for each and every customer. The upside for Intel is that the licensee is a new customer that Intel would not otherwise have had AND Intel doesn't have do a thing about guaranteeing yields. Win-win for TSMC/Intel/customer.

This agreement is nothing but a new revenue stream for Intel. It's unclear though how much this will actually bring in. ARM/Marvell, TI, and to a lesser extent MIPS and Renesas/ST (SHX core) have the market locked up for embedded CPU cores. These vendors span the range from the very high end (2 GHz ARM/Qualcomm Snapdragon) to the mundane (Renesas/ST SHX found in almost every laser printer in the world).

The Intel brand has been placed on many "chips" that were mfg outside of their fab network. Examples include flash memory by Sharp (many many years ago), almost all of their communications processors at one-time or another (TSMC, UMC, XFab, Atmel), and the rebranding of chips mfg by someone else.

At the end of the day, we don't have enough information of the deal to truly understand the implications. Is there a royalty fee or rev share? what are the use limitations? is there a vol cap? what are the termination clauses? contract expiration / renewal date(s)? etc. Without answers to these questions (and more)… everything is just speculation.

"people who like starwars know there are only 3, true starwars movies…"

what a crock of BS…for somebody that 'THINKS' they know starwars, you speak like you've never seen a single one.

i suppose the only reason you think the first three were good is because you were an impressionable, dim-witted, booger picking little kid for the first three…..

well, i'm most certain you don't know that the starwars saga actually consists, as it did originaly from the very first starwars in the 70s, of 9 episodes….not 3….not 6, but 9!!!!

(yes, there are 3 more in the mind of lucas but i wonder if it'll take another 20 years for those to be made)

perhaps you were to enamoured as a simple-minded, easily influenced person to realize the saga is more than the three movies you like.

the last three, episode 1 through 3 were absolutely great movies!!!

(as good if not better than the original three)

of course, i'm not caught up in my own selfish, ignorant, simple-minded point of view so that i express to the world my narrow-minded view of such things as movies nonetheless.

no, i figure you dislike the new starwars movies because you didn't get the same nostalgic euphoria coming over you that you eagerly anticipated the minute you heard the fourth starwars movie was being produced.

(it just goes to show….a lemming is a lemming is a lemming and they just dont change….but only keep on blindly following the others!)

Nor should the watch Star Wars.

Anyhow… the cooking analogy was working… and then you killed it. Seems like the last three paragraphs were just a lead-in to a corny joke.

From Jon Fortt: Last three grafs? Maybe the last two.