Intel acquires Linutronix
community.intel.com
community.intel.com
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It would be like buying a car and having to pay $20/month to have the 65mph speed limiter turned off.
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.
I would also argue you aren’t subsidizing the feature, they are subsidizing your budget chip.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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
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.
- 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.
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.
(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.)
Yet with software we don't much blink (though I suppose people DO like to see at least some download after they click Pay).
A while back suffered with HPUX hardware software not dialed in. Was painful slow working through issues with HP.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe we should talk about making certain business plans illegal.
In a world without the internet, keeping track of the paper was an insurmountable problem. So it only happened with a limited set of things worth doing it for.
But with digital storage, up scaling etc getting cheaper by the day we can now track everything anyone owns and rent it to them. So that's what everyone wants to do.
Unless your revolution happens or is prevented by making such rent seeking illegal, then in the future the only thing you will own will be what you can make with what little resources you are allowed to get.
Considering the consumer market at a CPU level makes very little sense, almost everyone just buys a device manufactured by an intermediate company.
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.
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".
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.
For a general purpose robot I might want baby sitting one year and health care provider another year.
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...
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.
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.
this was during the period when intel was riding the IOT hype train and made some dumb purchases.
see here for more
https://www.businessinsider.com/intel-is-probably-the-worst-...
Turns out it isn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Acquisitions_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?
So senseless.
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.
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.
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...
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).
https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-invests-in-open-source-r...
- 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.
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.
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...
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.
I know PREEMPT_RT is mostly independent of ISA; it's the parts that are not independent that worry me.