[HN Gopher] Intel acquires Linutronix
___________________________________________________________________
Intel acquires Linutronix
Author : HieronymusBosch
Score : 156 points
Date : 2022-02-23 14:45 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (community.intel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (community.intel.com)
| caleb-allen wrote:
| Intel seems to be making all the right moves. I'm excited to see
| what Pat Gelsinger can do over the next 5 years (I'm long INTC).
| bastardoperator wrote:
| After working directly with Intel and AMD engineers, my money
| is on AMD. The amount of planning they're doing is nothing
| short of incredible.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Intel is currently worth less than AMD even though Intel's
| profit is quite a bit higher than AMDs entire revenue. I
| recognize that Intel has huge problems to solve but they
| absolutely seem undervalued currently.
| noahmasur wrote:
| A quick search shows INTC market cap is 184B and AMD is 135B.
| AMD is worth 73% of Intel.
| tyrfing wrote:
| They are both a bit over 180B, that AMD number is prior to
| the XLNX acquisition which was done by issuing stock.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| My quick google search shows AMDs cap at 183B. So maybe not
| more valuable, but equally. Apparently AMD was worth more
| yesterday though https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amd-is-now-
| worth-more-than-ri...
| ZetaZero wrote:
| As of a few minutes ago... AMD: 181.86B INTC: 183.97B
| cinntaile wrote:
| AMD is way more nimble than Intel though, since they're
| fabless.
| missedthecue wrote:
| This seems like a strategic drawback.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Why? Plenty of chip companies are fabless. Apple is
| fabless, Nvidia is fabless.
| caleb-allen wrote:
| Neither Apple nor Nvidia compete with TSMC, while Intel
| does
| cinntaile wrote:
| The argument was that being fabless is a strategically
| bad move. I don't see how Intel competing with TSMC
| refutes that? What am I missing here?
| justin66 wrote:
| Intel competing with TSMC will not be a problem for Intel
| or TSMC until the chip shortage is well and truly behind
| us.
| pkulak wrote:
| And I'm more nimble than both because I'm fabless and
| designless.
| madspindel wrote:
| This seems like a strategic drawback.
| dotancohen wrote:
| That puts them more at the mercy of their suppliers.
| Replace "nimble" with "not in control".
| mhh__ wrote:
| Intel have been making balls-out plays (i.e. they could've
| just sold the fab business and MBA-ed themselves to death)
| and making good money but their stock is 30% or so down from
| last year so I am inclined to agree.
|
| They'll never have a run like they did from Nehalem through
| to Zen's launch, but I think they're about to prove that they
| still have it and that they know how to sell chips.
| ho_schi wrote:
| MBA-ed to deadth _hehe_
|
| German "Tod durch BWLer".
|
| If a company suffered from this it is IBM. They sold
| they're hardware business with long term earnings and the
| entry path to many customers was lost. Now there is Red Hat
| with the IBM-Letter attached to it. At least we see
| improving support for ThinkPads through Red Hat. Apple,
| Microsoft, Amazon instead invested in hardware with
| software. Siemens is another exampled for dead by MBA,
| thanks for ruining Siemens Nixdorf. How you can even think
| about focusing a company on one single market with a
| "Profit Center", you loss the broad base and flexibility.
| No other part can sustain you till you adapt to a change.
| dmead wrote:
| But they have mba'd themselves to death.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Not really. Intel's two core issues are engineering
| failures -- process technology and processor architecture
| dmead wrote:
| I have a basis peak in my desk that says otherwise.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Has nothing to do with Intel's problems
| Symmetry wrote:
| Are they having architecture issues? I guess I could
| criticize them for too-aggressively pursuing small
| microachitectural advantages leading to failures like
| Meltdown and making them spend more engineering-years
| than AMD for products that aren't that much better but,
| baring Meltdown, the end architectural results have been
| pretty good. My gripes would all be with the process,
| management decisions about how to respond to the process
| problem, or fusing off features for product segmentation
| reasons.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| By architecture, I'm referring to trade offs then made
| for single thread performance vs core count and memory
| channels
| cinntaile wrote:
| AMD spun off their fab business, they didn't MBA themselves
| to death so I'm not sure why that's the only possible end
| result you see?
| happycube wrote:
| The bad CEO (Hector Ruiz) who probably _would_ have done
| it left, and AMD eventually got a much much better CEO
| (Lisa Su).
| simpsond wrote:
| I agree they are undervalued. That said, AMD is growing
| quickly in terms of earnings, and intel is not. I think it's
| a matter of time and impeccable execution before Intel is
| winning again.
| MisterPea wrote:
| Same and also long INTC - Pat has been known for a while to be
| a very competent leader. I think the vertical integration that
| intel has will be extremely valuable in the next decade.
| bestouff wrote:
| Their current CPU-features-as-a-service marketing push doesn't
| look like a right move to me.
| cma wrote:
| For nvidia, in the datacenter, they made all the features of
| most cards a service you can't buy, and it paid off big for
| them.
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| caslon wrote:
| It's probably the right move financially. People love to pay
| more for less. Prebuilt desktop, server and cloud companies
| have built businesses around that concept.
|
| The average person is undereducated and easily parted from
| their money. It's a lot easier to make a bad product that
| appeals to them and get half the market for free than it is
| to make a good product and try to appeal to the best.
| kodah wrote:
| Calling the cloud "less" in terms of return is certainly a
| take. Writing software in a DC was pretty miserable,
| managing the systems in a DC while having zero control over
| provisioning, having to file tickets, sending endless
| emails, and dealing with single lane DCs with little to no
| redundancy was particularly miserable.
|
| The cloud has a lot of flaws, and I do think we'll end up
| back in DCs again, but it'll be different this time.
| Companies will have to have redundant internet providers,
| they'll have to provide APIs as opposed to helpdesks,
| they'll have to implement a redundant internal structure
| that scales well, storage will demand options. All of these
| things existed before the cloud, but became expectations
| when the cloud hit the market. That's why a lot of
| companies moved and I doubt they see it as "less".
| caslon wrote:
| Companies are generally stupid, because any group large
| enough regresses to the median of its members, or worse,
| the _average_ of its C-Levels. I 'm sure they don't
| consciously see the cloud as less, but that's still the
| selling point; it's why they value it.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is it rented or is it just pay-to-permanently-unlock.
|
| Paying to permanently unlock a feature might not be so bad.
| And forcing extensions to justify their price might not be
| the worst thing. And this might let them get the "nobody is
| paying for avx-512" signal a little faster than spinning up a
| billion slightly different SKUs.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Wouldn't that be exactly the right thing to do if you want to
| minimize physical sku's and maximize sales?
|
| as far as the user is concerned, if they put deactivated
| silicon on a chip, and can hit the power envelope targets,
| then it's like it wasn't there at all...
| eptcyka wrote:
| They can produce more chips from the same wafer if they
| just produce smaller chips. I think doing this is stupid in
| the long run.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| OK, I get the worry around software-enabled CPU features. I
| really do. But what evidence do we have that Intel is pushing
| it specifically for renting those features out vs price
| differentiation at purchase time (which has been their model
| forever)
| dannyw wrote:
| Like it or not, that's probably where the industry will be in
| 5 years. You might not like it, but X-as-a-service make way
| more money for the company, and shareholders.
|
| It'll probably look like this: buy a 'cheap' Intel CPU for
| $99 (say, 4P, 12E cores clocked at 2 GHz), with "Turbo" to
| 4.5 GHz being a $79/year subscription and "Extreme Turbo Max"
| to 5.1 GHz being an additional $35/year. First year free, of
| course, to get you hooked on the 'turbo' speeds.
|
| Intel would be able to capture ~97% of those proceeds;
| instead of having to pay XX% to the distributor and retailer.
|
| Would consumers revolt? Some might, but the masses will click
| 'Buy Now' with a $99 sticker price versus competitor
| offerings at $400; give it one financial year and AMD's board
| will force them to follow suit.
| bnjms wrote:
| I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that this type of
| future will lead to literal class warfare. I believe
| whatever the next punk movement is will be reactionary
| against this type of lock-in; cultural and economic.
|
| Maybe we should talk about making certain business plans
| illegal.
| pdimitar wrote:
| You are forgetting two things:
|
| - Apple. They charge premium for their hardware but don't
| make you pay to use extra features of the CPU/GPU. And a
| lot of common folk already love the 8GB M1 Air and buy it
| in droves. It's going to last them 7 years easily, if not
| 10.
|
| - Most people hold on to their computers with a death grip
| until it can't boot anymore. I have a friend who just two
| months ago finally replaced a laptop with 1.5GB RAM and
| 180GB HDD. He used it for 13-15 years.
|
| Both of these mean that Intel and AMD can find themselves
| with 30% of their previous sales or less, if they try to
| force the CPU-features-as-a-service thing.
|
| They can only stretch the "you're not the target audience
| of these new machines" trope only to a certain extent.
|
| Common consumers getting indifferent and holding on to
| their existing tech is a real market force.
|
| Having to "hold on until the market adapts" might become
| too big a pill to swallow for Intel / AMD shareholders.
| tyrfing wrote:
| Much less likely than just selling enterprise features,
| which is particularly common for networking companies
| selling stuff like ports "on demand". The trend is towards
| a lot more accelerators and specialty features (AXV512,
| AMX, HBM-related), which aren't going to have universal
| demand, charging for them separately might allow for fewer
| SKUs (lower unit costs) without charging everyone for
| features they don't want.
|
| Considering the consumer market at a CPU level makes very
| little sense, almost everyone just buys a device
| manufactured by an intermediate company.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Damn, the future of personal computing gets more depressing
| every day.
| echelon wrote:
| The market economy has discovered this path and is
| allowing it.
|
| - iPhone you can't freely distribute software to (and
| Android makes it sufficiently difficult that only 0.01%
| of users can do it, so we may as well count them in too)
|
| - infrastructure giants that turn open source services
| into paid platforms and then accrete all developer
| mindshare
|
| - thin clients replacing thick clients. Workloads will
| move from desktop computers to the cloud. No need for a
| beefy computer to run software locally. More moat for the
| platforms since tools won't develop for a small market of
| hobbyists.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Android makes it sufficiently difficult that only
| 0.01% of users can do it,_
|
| That's BS. My mom installed f-droid by herself and can
| install apps from APKs without any help.
|
| It's not like you gotta root your phone, use ADB, or
| break out the CLI for that. All you have to do is tap
| Install when prompted, that's it. OMG, so complex, only
| 0.01% of users can tap Install in F-droid. /s
| echelon wrote:
| Purely anecdotal. It sounds like your mom is pretty tech
| savvy, thorough.
|
| F-droid is less popular than Unix on the desktop. They
| don't publish any stats, but as a proxy, their Twitter
| account only has 10k followers and their forums receive
| fewer than ten posts a day.
|
| Google trends shows "Ubuntu vs f-droid" dwarfing the
| latter term to the point there's no signal at all.
| Perhaps that's an unfair comparison, but I was expecting
| it to be closer.
| moonchrome wrote:
| That makes no sense - you would just buy the ultra cheap
| unlocked model each year. Also how do you justify paying
| for a boost when the next gen is faster and an incremental
| price increase.
| missedthecue wrote:
| That's just leasing, which unlike SaaS, is not a new
| business model. It's been around for thousands of years,
| and there are a lot of problems with it. How do you repo
| from a non-paying account for instance? With a SaaS, their
| account is automatically turned off. This isn't the case
| when leasing out an actual physical product.
| dannyw wrote:
| Intel Management Engine.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Sure you can remotely disable it, but unless you get the
| chip back, you've lost it, and you'd have been better off
| selling it anyway.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Depends upon the default rate. It might still make sense
| even accounting for the losses. Especially if the upfront
| fees cover the marginal manufacturing costs.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| that's a very dark future for personal computer. its
| already suck with Windows to pay for different level of OS
| features.
|
| if Intel go this route then i'm glad that Apple paved the
| way to use ARM for personal computer.
|
| i bought a mac mini w/M1 and it was amazing. i can code
| .Net with jetbrains's rider without a problem, run multiple
| apps and play Hearthstone, all on 8gb of RAM.
|
| i hope to see RISC-V for personal computer in the near
| future.
| feanaro wrote:
| > Like it or not, that's probably where the industry will
| be in 5 years. You might not like it, but X-as-a-service
| make way more money for the company, and shareholders.
|
| Do _you_ like it?
|
| I kind of hate this modern trend of taking the most
| dystopian possible kind of future as something completely
| inevitable and normal.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| This will suck until enthusiasts figure out how to
| jailbreak the processors to unlock maximum speeds.
| exikyut wrote:
| I would _not_ like to order my dystopian cyberpunk future
| from IBM 's or Oracle's or Microsoft's mail order
| catalogues, please.
|
| IIUC, you needed to license each individual core of IBM's
| POWER servers. And then license the exact set of software
| features you needed enabled.
|
| I don't think I need to talk about Oracle licensing.
|
| I only recently learned (aww, can't re-find the comment)
| that Microsoft volume licensing in enterprise charges a
| seat license for Macs not running Windows.
|
| This feels like an even more depressed reinvention of that.
| Me not want.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Enterprise licensing is a tarpit of unimaginable
| fuckedness.
|
| The most ridiculous kind of licensing I've ever seen is
| an application (for data compression) where "how many
| bytes did it save" has to be accounted because it's one
| of the main ways the license fees are calculated.
|
| And of course the usual insanity with twenty different
| portals (one for every other president, and about as old)
| per vendor, disjoint logins, human-in-the-loop
| verification and so on.
| jfoutz wrote:
| OOOHHH! kinda curious, if I create a byte stream that's
| larger when compressed, do they pay me?
| imglorp wrote:
| That trick might work for home desktop due to the short
| sight bug in human consumers (mostly gamers?), but does it
| make sense for server? It seems like a bunch of potential
| liabilities for a cloud host or data center operator. This
| is basically DRM for CPU and as such, its primary function
| is to stop working when all the business rules don't line
| up right.
| dr_zoidberg wrote:
| They tried it for home desktop ~10 years ago and had to
| back down:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service
| exikyut wrote:
| _[ Sad mumbling about the ten year gap between United
| States vs. Microsoft Corp (2001) and the Chromebook
| (2011) ]_
|
| (In all seriousness, I just googled both of them for the
| first time as I typed the above to check the dates
| expecting it to be like 15 years or something. I honestly
| wasn't expecting... a small whiplash moment. Ow.)
| svnt wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how it transfers from the
| consumer to the B2B arena but it gives them more latitude
| with price, which can only help them if they use it
| properly.
|
| It wouldn't surprise me if it flips the other way in B2B
| and they sell contracts for X years of Y teraflops
| instead of individual chips with fragile DRM on extra
| pieces.
| zxspectrum1982 wrote:
| It sure makes sense on the server-side. That's been IBM's
| business model for mainframes for half a century.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| That's true, I had to pay IBM in the 90's for a CPU
| upgrade where they just dial in, change a config, and
| poof-more CPU. It was completely infuriating and one
| reason we migrated to HPUX. The hardware support from IBM
| was amazing though - the techs are very well trained and
| show up with basically another mainframe in the van and
| start swapping parts until things work.
| technofiend wrote:
| Dude, Sun in their heyday offered a similar service that
| allowed you to online more CPUs as needed. As I recall HP
| tried to as well. I mean sling all the hash you want at
| IBM, but at some point midrange people tried to do the
| same thing and for the same reasons - making it easy to
| capture every last bit of revenue and less enticing for
| you to switch platforms.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's strange how paying for an upgrade where they swap a
| part feels much better than a _faster_ upgrade they can
| do remotely.
|
| Yet with software we don't much blink (though I suppose
| people DO like to see at least some download after they
| click Pay).
| landemva wrote:
| IBM support was great. OTA CPU upgrade is convenient.
|
| A while back suffered with HPUX hardware software not
| dialed in. Was painful slow working through issues with
| HP.
| detaro wrote:
| Not just mainframes, on POWER servers they offer the
| same.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > but does it make sense for server?
|
| Typically in Server/Enterprise the licensing is self-
| report and audit or activation model. I think the
| activation model would probably apply here quite easily.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Their current CPU-features-as-a-service marketing push
| doesn't look like a right move to me.
|
| That was bothering me a bit too, but then I realized it may
| have a use that most of us don't care about. Sure they could
| charge more for AVX512 or whatever, and they might try to
| charge rent for such options which I'm not a fan of. But what
| if they are being asked by 3-letter agencies for chips with
| custom circuitry that would be relatively low volume,
| somewhat annoying to produce? If it's not too much area they
| could just add those features to every CPU and only enable
| them for those agencies via SDSi interface. Just speculation
| in a direction that is IMHO less awful than excess
| monetization.
| svnt wrote:
| This is already a standard practice and wouldn't require
| changing their business model.
| lisper wrote:
| It also wouldn't require a public announcement.
| danuker wrote:
| How does it bother you less, assuming that 3-letter
| agencies can access parts of CPUs that you can't?
|
| If anything, it bothers me more! Why would they get special
| treatment, and why would I have to subsidize its features
| paying for my CPU to have it, but disabled?
| exikyut wrote:
| FWIW, IIUC the binning process that designates chips as
| Core, Xeon, Pentium etc series ultimately sources parts
| from a common set of conveyor belts, identifying final
| designations using QC processes that further subclassify
| against what parts of a chip do not work correctly. So if
| say the AVX512 unit in a single core doesn't pass muster
| an entire die might go in the "doesn't have AVX512" bin
| and then get marketed appropriately; or perhaps (uncited
| speculation) a chip that fails the test suite for a Xeon
| E3 might get rebranded as a Core i3 instead.
|
| I do wonder what percentage of this classification
| process is driven by process yield and how much is driven
| by volume quota requirements. I wouldn't be surprised to
| learn that this is an area of careful optimization; for
| all I know the entire silicon portfolio just ships the
| process yield org chart.
|
| But all this means the user-facing FLAGS in the chip
| under the keyboard I'm typing this comment on is the
| result of a fuse configuration (aka policy), rather than
| a 1:1 representation of the potential of the photomask,
| and there are very likely a few micrometers worth of
| functionality I'll never get to use.
|
| Of course I'm very curious if this is because the
| disabled areas were faulty (optimal use of manufacturing
| potential) or because *shrug* The Manufacturing Computer
| needed to meet its quota of Core i5s that day (arguably
| optimal fulfillment of volume potential). (Then there's
| the argument of disabling feature X across all cores for
| consistency, hmph.) But this is all firmly out in the
| weeds of implementation minutiae, and way beyond
| reasonable optimization; I have no idea what's
| theoretically broken in my CPU - and whether re-enabling
| that functionality explicitly to torture-test stuff I
| might like to make resilient would present me a relevant
| surface area of functionality I even knew what to do with
| (haven't yet played with C intrinsics for example).
|
| At the end of the day, disabling functionality on-chip
| seems to be one of the few viable ways to claw
| fabrication yield back to something commercially viable
| and not utterly eye-watering, and IIUC it's been a staple
| for a long time.
|
| Rereading your comment I realize it's quite possible you
| were writing with some or all of the above context
| implied and I may have misread. Not sure, disregard if
| so.
| danuker wrote:
| I am impressed that this reuse is possible cheaply. I
| have had no exposure to the business end of this process.
| Indeed, my comment may be less relevant than I thought.
|
| If it might not be clear even to the manufacturer which
| chip pays for which other chip, then I might give them a
| pass.
|
| I suppose the only way to tell for sure would be de-
| lidding and comparing. But that's an expensive hobby.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > * That was bothering me a bit too, but then I realized it
| may have a use that most of us don't care about.*
|
| That's how it starts. First it happens to people whose
| needs you can't relate to, and then one day they'll want
| extra money so the accelerated video support starts working
| again.
|
| It should bother you.
| pinewurst wrote:
| Really? Name a single successful Intel acquisition, especially
| open source.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Mobileye ?
| BeetleB wrote:
| Bought for 15B. Net profit in 2021 was $1B. It'll take a
| while to get their investment back. Not sure I'd call it a
| successful acquisition.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| They're trying to IPO mobileye for $50B. If they can pull
| that off the acquisition will have been a major success.
| pinewurst wrote:
| But not an intentional one. They bought it as a "hey
| we're relevant too!" move at peak autonomous car hype,
| and as it's hardly additive in real life, are trying to
| IPO it for the dumb money before they have to write it
| off (e.g. Habana).
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Peak autonomous hype would be when it's there.
|
| And there is too much money in it to never be there, to
| although I think it will take longer than most
| predictions.
|
| And net profit while amount of employees have grown 5
| fold. Growth of 24% yoy is pretty good.
| Tobu wrote:
| Wind River seems like it did okay. Bought for $884 million
| and sold for $4.3 billion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_River_Systems
| belval wrote:
| I read your statement and I thought "should be easy to find
| at least one"!
|
| Turns out it isn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Acqui
| sitions_and_investm...
|
| Not only does none of these ring a bell, all the software
| ones seem to be legitimate garbage. Why did intel buy a cloud
| gaming startup?
| kgc wrote:
| Maybe acquihires
| svnt wrote:
| The non-chip business at intel is a sideshow of uncommitted
| grasping.
| FunkyDuckk wrote:
| Altera?
| Symmetry wrote:
| Intel has a lot of irons in the fire and some very talented
| engineers, but they've always competed with a process advantage
| behind them and been able to use it to recover from the
| occasional architecture misstep like Itanium or the Pentium IV.
| Pat Gelsinger is probably the best CEO they could have picked
| but they're in a tough position and I'm not optimistic.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| A lack of process advantage is exactly the problem. I
| remember being at nVIDIA in 2008 and being afraid about
| Intel's Larrabee x86-based GPU architecture. I was genuinely
| afraid because they could do full custom design on the latest
| process and so the physical design would be much superior to
| nVIDIA even if the higher level architecture was not as
| great. I didn't care much about the x86 aspect because I knew
| software needed to be re-developed for GPU anyway so having a
| compiler generating a custom/private ISA wasn't a big deal
| vs. x86.
|
| When Larrabee failed I breathed a sigh of relief. To me that
| failure was huge, and the fact they are trying to replay that
| strategy (building a competitive GPU) but without an unfair
| manufacturing advantage speaks to the hole that Intel has dug
| themselves into. It's not a grave, but the stock price has
| not baked this reality in yet. We've got a long ways down to
| go. This won't look like a simple turnaround story. The
| company will appear dead before it can come roaring back. If.
| oumua_don17 wrote:
| And the rumour on the street was that Larrabee was one of
| the reasons why Pat Gelsinger had to leave Intel.
|
| And Intel Arc GPU is not being delivered on time either,
| last I heard was early Q1 2022 which is now Q2 2022. And in
| recent investor day conference, they again announced delays
| in their 2023 server chip.
|
| These delays have occurred after Pat at the the helm,
| combined with Intel burning through a lot of cash; I don't
| understand why most are so gung-ho about Pat. Thankfully
| the early comparisons with Steve Jobs when he returned to
| Intel have stopped, they were both laughable and an insult
| to SJ.
|
| [1] http://vrworld.com/2009/09/18/pat-gelsinger-left-intel-
| becau...
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Yes, forgot about the connection with Pat Gelsinger. It
| would be really disappointing if they blew Arc. In fact,
| given how much I think the current position of Intel is a
| product of their GPU project failure over a decade ago
| (look at where NVDA is today), I would put the most focus
| on absolutely nailing Arc and being competitive with NVDA
| and AMD in high performance GPU space. This would be a
| big morale lift and would probably be the first big step
| on the staircase to salvation.
| zmk5 wrote:
| Hopefully this results in even better drivers for Linux. I wonder
| if the graphics cards they have planned will have good Linux
| drivers too. I've always had a good experience with their Linux
| integrated graphics drivers so far.
| wakeupcall wrote:
| Sure, they work somewhat. Always first to get support for the
| new rendering backend on linux, even before the hardware is
| released. However, they're plagued with issues. As a linux user
| of integrated intel graphics for the last 10+ years, the cycle
| has been: driver works with new hardware, but with major bugs
| that impact usability. Major bugs get ironed out in the first
| 6/10 months, leaving with half a dozen papercuts for a good 1-2
| years. By the time the driver is stable, a new shiny rendering
| model/backend/engine is enabled somewhere in the stack, rolling
| back progress. I generally switched laptops faster than intel's
| ability to fix bugs on existing hardware. I have a couple good
| stories on certain individual series, but that's it. Not to
| mention, most of the driver issues are worked around in the
| software you're using most of the time, so the fact that you
| don't see issues doesn't mean the driver is working fine.
|
| I was also disappointed recently by the AX500 driver on linux.
| For a good part of the last year, I couldn't get stable
| connections. BT was next to useless. Every driver release would
| fix one issue in wifi, just to break BT, and vice-versa.
|
| For a company the size of intel and such massive marketshare in
| premium laptops I do not consider this acceptable.
|
| The amdgpu driver has actually less bugs on vega currently, has
| opencl working right out of the box to booth. I had less issues
| with realtek drivers on wireless too.
| hansendc wrote:
| I hope so too! But, I was trying to think of if I've ever seen
| the Linutronix folks working on the Intel graphics code. I
| don't think I have:
|
| https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
|
| For very selfish reasons, I'm hoping that this acquisition will
| give the Linutronix folks even more of an opportunity to
| contribute to the core kernel and especially arch/x86.
|
| Disclaimer: I work on Linux at Intel.
| zmk5 wrote:
| Thanks for your hard work!
| silisili wrote:
| Echoing this. Intel has by far the best working out of the
| box graphics drivers. I usually go Intel APUs for this
| reason, and am excited by the move into discrete.
| l1k wrote:
| There's a series currently under discussion which failed CI:
|
| https://lore.kernel.org/intel-
| gfx/20211214140301.520464-1-bi...
|
| Plus 13 patches over the past years (not counting merges and
| SPDX commits):
|
| https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin.
| ..
|
| Unfortunately, a lot of the PREEMPT_RT patches follow the
| "disable stuff for now, fix up for real later" anti-pattern.
| :-(
|
| Case in point:
|
| https://lore.kernel.org/intel-
| gfx/YgqmfKhwU5spS069@linutroni...
| hegzploit wrote:
| Is Linutronix by any way related to Pengutronix?
| https://www.pengutronix.de
| synergy20 wrote:
| sadly everything intel touched on embedded linux over the years
| all failed so far,e.g. windriver,yocto,its embedded chip
| efforts,even ARM,etc.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| What does this mean for the future of PREEMPT_RT on ARM?
|
| I know PREEMPT_RT is mostly independent of ISA; it's the parts
| that are not independent that worry me.
| taffronaut wrote:
| As Thomas Gleixner has been the x86 maintainer since 2008, what
| do they gain from this? It seems a pretty close relationship
| already. It's not as if they're acquiring IP. Conversely if
| they'll allow Linutronix to continue "to operate as an
| independent business" and e.g. work on other architectures like
| RISC-V, then that dilutes their access to the talent they're
| acquiring.
| ojn wrote:
| Yeah, Intel clearly has no interest in helping RISC-V succeed.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-invests-in-open-source-r...
| [deleted]
| gary_0 wrote:
| Intel is well aware that their x86 IP isn't the secret sauce
| it used to be. If RISC-V takes over the world, they won't be
| caught off-guard.
| jabl wrote:
| Maybe, but I think the more immediate motivations are
|
| - Get customers for their fab services division, now that
| they're making a serious push to fab 3rd party chips.
|
| - Help RISC-V threaten ARM at the low end, thus taking away
| attention and resources ARM could otherwise use to compete
| with x86 servers.
| svnt wrote:
| Maybe he was going to go do something else and they purchased
| some golden handcuffs and a smooth transition?
| rzw2 wrote:
| Maybe Intel is developing a new chip architecture and want to
| support linux from day 0? Or does Intel want a team of Kernel
| developers for their AI Silicon play, support the lower level
| architecture, or for their GPU play?
| hansendc wrote:
| Yes, it's been a pretty close relationship for a long, long
| time.
|
| What does Intel get out of this? I'm really hoping that Intel
| gets help improving the kernel from a talented bunch of kernel
| developers who have experience working closely with paying
| customers. Intel has tons of kernel developers, but few of us
| are very directly customer-facing.
|
| I also hope the Linutronix folks can spend less time on "castle
| maintenance" and more time on kernel maintenance.
| https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PREEMPT_...
|
| (BTW, I work on Intel at Linux).
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Cute Lego digger:
| https://linutronix.de/videos/Linutronix_Bagger_1080.mp4
| [deleted]
| alksjdalkj wrote:
| Looks like K'Nex, not Lego. Still very cool!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%27Nex
| O5vYtytb wrote:
| Pretty sure it's Lego: https://www.lego.com/en-
| us/product/bucket-wheel-excavator-42...
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| That's Technic Lego.
| teekert wrote:
| That sounds like a fun company to work for :)
|
| Sure one can whine about an RPi and "industrial reliability"
| (and all I can think of is that damned SD card...), but hey,
| it's just a cool movie, and it communicates in a nice way what
| they do. Also, it sounds like they should have been involved in
| the Mars helicopter (Ingenuity), which runs Linux and need
| these types of techniques. Cool podcast on the subject: [0]
|
| [0]: https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/145067/mars-goes-to-
| shel...
| rbanffy wrote:
| > and all I can think of is that damned SD card...
|
| I'm having some better experiences with SD cards marketed as
| "high endurance". Another trick I've been doing is to mount
| /var/log as tmpfs. If they crash when they run out of space,
| I let them restart themselves.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| While I agree with everything you said to a certain extent, I
| agree less that their expertise makes them uniquely qualified
| to engineer the flight software for the prototype helicopter
| on Mars. It is quite a different environment, but there is
| certainly plenty of crossover. I think JPL has enough
| expertise in this domain, though.
|
| But yes, it's a wonderful thing that a fairly-accessible
| linux distribution is powering space missions in this era.
| It's long overdue, I think, and many of the JPL folks would
| probably agree.
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