Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

Note that Eltech's ExaGear used to be a thing, and has now largely disappeared, along with the company homepage.

I don't know whether they've been bought by Huawei, who is now reviving the product under their own name.

Original announcement of discontinuation:

    --- Eltechs Weekly News Digest ---

    We have discontinued ExaGear...
    Dear ExaGear users!

    We're really sorry to announce our business decision about discontinuing our services and products.

    You'll be able to continue using all of your purchased products, the license checking functionality will work.

    You can download our most recent ExaGear Desktop version 3.1 below:

    ExaGear Desktop for Raspberry Pi 3
    ExaGear Desktop for Raspberry Pi 2
    ExaGear Desktop for Raspberry Pi 1/Zero
    ExaGear Desktop for Odroid XU4
    ExaGear Desktop for Odroid C2
    ExaGear Desktop for Odroid 32bit
    ExaGear Desktop for NVIDIA Jetson TX1 / TX2
    ExaGear Desktop for NVIDIA Jetson TK1
    ExaGear Desktop for CubieBoard
    ExaGear Desktop for Banana Pi
    ExaGear Desktop for ARMv7
    ExaGear Desktop for ARMv8
    We strongly recommend to save ExaGear installation package on your own hard drive because the download won't be available after February 28th, 2019.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20190227095445/http://forum.elte...

Some more information:

A chinese-speaking internet user put in some research and according to them it appears to be Eltech's software. They also appear to be somewhat angry that Huawei did not properly credit Eltech.

Note that apparently there was a lot of controversy around this on Chinese boards, with people arguing vehemently for either side (based on Eltech's software vs. not based on it).

Chinese: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/263519125

Translated: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

HN user 'oefrha' managed to find the official project page and documentation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25750553

Eltechs' ExaGear at the time only provided x86_32 compatibility on top of 32-bit Arm.

This is a major departure from that, my best guess would be that Huawei purchased the company and then poured lots of resources to it.

Given the timeline Eltech had likely been shut down for at least a year. Then Apple came around with their x86 to ARM translation layer, prompting Huawei to go shopping for a competitor, seeing the defunct Eltech, and buying their IP.

Sounds like a late happy ending for a failed company that was just a few years too early with their product. I hope the founders got a good deal.

...or Huawei strategically decided to take advantage of their vertical integration (with HiSilicon ARM chips), by moving its processors up the value chain into laptops, thereby capturing more profit instead of paying Intel/AMD? Such strategic decisions are usually years in the making - and everyone could see the trajectory of ARM vs x86 for years

ARM processors in laptops predates the M1 by many years - you don't need inspiration from Apple to figure out that efficiently running x86 code on ARM hardware is useful.

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