The Next Stage for Chips and Cheese
Hello you fine internet folks!
We here at Chips and Cheese have been busy building the best benchmarking bonanza we believe the industry needs. You might read us for our detailed content, or for our open source tests over on GitHub, but one thing is certain, when we became a 501c3 organization earlier this year (see The State of the Union post for details), our goals as an official registered charity have been to provide tools to the community to enable deep architectural analysis of the latest computer cores and graphics subsystems launched on any continent. We’ve used these tools for our coverage of AMD, Intel, Ampere, Zhaoxin, NVIDIA, and many others, and have had engineers from these companies request more detail on how our tools work.
As part of that journey, we want to be able to provide a wide reaching platform with engaging touch points for the community and the industry. In recent months, you may have seen us participate in recorded 1-on-1 style interviews with leading chip architects, helping us get to the bottom of some of these design decisions. Another avenue you can follow us is over on the YouTube channel, which will be crossposted here.
One of the limiting factors for Chips and Cheese over the past year has been access and growth. On our Wordpress platform, while mature, we have been relying heavily on word-of-mouth, social media, regular visitors, or subscribers to our RSS feed. In short, an old-media route. This is despite remaining ad-free, a key tenet of the Chips and Cheese ethos. As we have seen in recent weeks even, such as with the death of AnandTech (a spiritual predecessor) the old-media route has by-and-large died.Â
Chips and Cheese has been sustained to date due to the generosity of its Patreons (a donation platform) as well as random one-off donors, and the free time donated by the staff and supporters on the discord channel. While this just about keeps the lights on, as a growth vector it unfortunately limits what we can do behind the scenes here. In recent months we have begun to engage deeper with companies in this industry, notably AMD with our coverage of MI300X GPU, NVIDIA on our coverage of the Grace CPU, and Intel with our coverage of Lunar Lake and Xeon 6 microarchitectures. This also means attending events, which for the most part have been out of pocket as well.
In order to facilitate the next stage of Chips and Cheese, we have migrated our content to a new platform that helps engage with the wider community. You may notice, we’re now on Substack! Based on recommendations and peers, Substack offers a better opportunity for our team to share its coverage and updates with the industry. In our research, Substack’s integration with mailing lists, subscribers, and recommendations, provides a deeper potential for engagement, and support. There are some minor issues, such as tables, but we’re working with the team at Substack to best implement that for our brand of technical content.Â
As a result, we’re enabling a trial run of the platform to assist in Chips and Cheese’s future.
For our most visitors, please sign up to the mailing list to get the latest C&C updates direct to your inbox. We won’t spam - every piece we send will be honest and detailed on our analysis of hardware, or our interactions with the engineers at the heart of these designs. For our most frequent visitors, please share the content we send you to people of interest - we all know you’re interested in what the industry is doing! For those of us that believe in our passion, we are opening up a paid-subscription model. As a 501c3, these subscriptions will be tax-deductible, but either way they do support the work going on here at Chips and Cheese.
And for those wondering, Chips and Cheese will remain free to access for all of our content, and our tools. This is a steadfast commitment to our readers, backed by the entire team here, and ingrained into our 501c3 mission statement.
If you have any thoughts or questions about our move, please let us know - either in the comments here, in our lively Discord channel, or send a DM over Substack. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
As for now, we’re coming up to AMD’s AI event this week. We’re on site and will have content about the event!
Signed,
George (Cheese) and the rest of the Chips and Cheese team
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Yiss
I think this is a mistake. I'm sure substack makes for a better platform for business/marketing/publishing features, but as a reader it's nothing but a turn off. I'm trying to keep an open mind but there's something a lot cleaner about a self-hosted blog.
I hope this really is a trial and I bet many other of your daily readers do too, given the overwhelmingly negative response the last time you mentioned substack: https://old.chipsandcheese.com/2024/05/09/chips-and-cheese-state-of-the-union/
Keep the mailing list, but please don't do this to your readers. Or at least put new content on the old site too.