Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition Over the years, Intel has established itself as a paragon of the open source community, but that could soon change under the x86 giant's new leadership. Speaking to press and analysts at Intel's Tech Tour in Arizona last week, Kevork Kechichian, who now leads Intel's datacenter biz, believes it's time to rethink what …
The 432 was an ambitious project, but it was way too complicated. Intel just couldn't help themselves from the early 80s to this very day... They just have to make everything as complicated as possible, making the resulting device impossible to validate, awkward to use, slower and more expensive than it needs to be. It doesn't look like they're learning a lesson any time soon too - this cash may as well be boat-anchors instead of life-preservers.
Maybe not "near", but the downturn could happen. And not just CPU and processors.
It's nearly a truism today that recommended NICs and network chipsets for a lot of datacenter work are from Intel. Often due to strong driver support for Linux and the BSD's. If the devs and support start to drop off, the hardware would likely follow.
There is still Realtek, usually in desktops and less expensive systems. But largely gone are the days of multiple NIC and network chipset vendors with good open source OS driver support.
I have to wonder who it might be if Intel network chips fall by the wayside due to diminishing Linux and BSD driver support. It's not like Broadcom is wonderful, and Nvidia has nothing to brag about in the area of open source drivers.
I think Intel CPUs have definitely passed their Zenith: Google and Amazon are running whatever they can get to compile on ARM because they can sell it for less and still earn more. But NICs and the rest will take a while to shift largely because of the lack of competition. Though, again, it's possible the someone could develop their own and provide reference designs.
This post has been deleted by its author
The whinge about everybody playing with their toys could have come straight out of the mouth of Mango Mussolini.
There is a cost to maintaining "Pax Intel-icana", which leaders must bear.
Whittling down on these sorts of supports, similar to eating your own foot because you are hungry, is a sign of a steep decline.
A savvy investor would short intel on these sorts of admissions.
> is a bigger problem for open source in general if the maintainers find themselves without an income.
Surely it’s a bigger problem for open source on Intel.
Those maintainers were being paid by Intel to improve the performance of open source on Intel chipsets. A question has to be asked is whether maintainers of the optimisers for Windows have been shown the door….
If the software needs to be developed, then the development costs are independent of whether its closed or open source. And, given the amount of work done on this kind of software by open source developers over the last twenty years, to cut yourself off from that even if ostensibly by no longer releasing source, is going to impose considerable costs on you not least through the whole process of what you can and cannot release.
And this has nothing to do with the GPL zealots, but with the kind of peer review that is essential for good hardware support. Intel's previous generations of engineering experts understood that this was essential for their business if they intended to be able to lead the pack and earn the kind of margins they did. And now they want to be a Broadcom also ran?
So I guess this means that Intel is going to shift over to a BSD variant for it's servers to leverage proprietary "Intel Inside" open source. Another way to do this is to proprietary blob itself into oblivion. Strategic planning has been Intel's death by a thousand cuts for a couple of decades now and even intensive care may not be enough to save it. So apparently in order to prove that this is entirely on purpose they want to add yet another cut. Keep slicing Intel, somewhere down there is an artery. To be clear I do not want to see Intel go out of business because I love what they've done for AMD lately.
"We have probably the largest footprint on open source out there from an infrastructure standpoint. We need to find a balance where we use that as an advantage to Intel and not let everyone else take it and run with it."
"Our intention is never to leave open source. There are lots of people benefiting from the huge investment that Intel put in there. We're just going to figure out how we can get more out of that [Intel's open source contributions] versus everyone else using our investments."
"Intel remains deeply committed to open source. We’re sharpening our focus on where and how we contribute — ensuring our efforts not only reinforce the communities we’ve supported for decades but also highlight the unique strengths of Intel."
That they're stating there is a problem and exploring options to make more money, says there will be some changes. Maybe they'll just start cutting the open source software projects that are less popular, maybe they'll be keeping more of their code as proprietary, or maybe they'll try some more restrictive open-source licenses that'll be sure to enrage their customers.
Either way, it's clear they don't see what a competitive advantage their software already gives them, and are at serious risk of killing this golden goose, too, just as they did with their lead in fabs by under-investing there.
This post has been deleted by its author
Intel doesn't do that anymore - they only release proprietary software - although in the past they released some free software (the Linux graphics driver for the 4500MHD and similar cards for example - although you also need mesa and someone that wasn't Intel wrote free graphics init for it).
Well there it is, "open" and "closed" utilized as intended to downplay how "OneMKL" is proprietary software…
Yeah .. If I'm not mistaken, even the age-old i915-driver for their Intel iGPU is still buggy asf and serves a black-screen every now and then.
Not to mention Vulkan or anything ARC-graphics.
Intel's OneAPI stuff like TBB, Embree, MKL and whatnot, has only been 'open', since they try to spread a software-basis, which runs best only on Intel-hardware, while crippling all other vendors' hardware with crippling performance out of spite when run on anything but Intel. Eff that corrupt unethical sh!t.
It's basically a sneaky continuation of their age-old trying to corrupt the world-wide software-landscape at its root in Intel's favour alone, when giving away their Intel Compiler for free.
The i915 driver is buggy with certain old integrated graphics, but otherwise works fine.
Vulkan is only supported by Intel if you use their propriety drivers and anything ARC-related is proprietary (as the software for the GPU is proprietary and is digitally handcuffed with a digital signature to prevent you from replacing it with free software).
Intel's C++ compiler and other software has explicitly been proprietary from the very start.
>which runs best only on Intel-hardware
It's nothing to do with the hardware - Intel's compilers contain an antifeature where a well optimized code path and also the worst optimized code path possible is produced and there is also a malicious function added, that only selects the optimized path if CPUID is "GeniuneIntel".
It is possible to patch the software to enable the optimized code path for all processors that support the used instruction set extensions, but it seems Intel's proprietary license says you can't do that.
It's a much better idea to just use GCC - as it's free software, doesn't produced sabotaged output and its optimizer is probably better for the most part now.
I'm not sure what's actually going on here. Intel's reason to contribute so heavily to Linux was to ensure that Linux worked well on their hardware. They wanted that because Linux was becoming highly important in the server market. Wind forward to today, and Linux is even more entrenched. You'd think it was even more important. Intel's hardware is fundamentally uncompetitive, it's been a long time now since they lead anything. Making their hardware more expensive to run software on, or harder to use, or just a nuissance of license admin is not going to attract users to their hardware.
Whereas the ARM and AMD's of the world who do make competitive hardware will see this as "well, that's them gone (or at least, going)".
Intel can make this work for them, but they have to produce some super-competitive hardware that makes us all want to pay to use it. I just can't see that happening, not given Intel's recent employment history or the long-standing norms of the US economy.
Funny one.
The guy making this announcement has been around in ARM and NXP. I dont know him.
Speaking as a long gone Blue and Green badge ex Inteler, my time at Intel was ffing grim. Waste of time.
Intel were useless - creating new CPU, disbanding the team, then hiring SW people to try and get it working - with no support.
Ive had a quick look at Intels page and I cannot see where Intel are doing anything that would benefit an competitor.
Most of the stuff listed is Intel - and a lot of others - kicking money//Hw into a pot to support development/not be left out.
Or just writing drivers for us own GPUs.
I'm thinking it could be Lip's doing. He came from Cadence. A company that sells software for money and does not give any of it away. He probably sees open source as a bad thing. Which is back to comments I've made before. Lip is going to end up torching Intel. Not a hardware guy. Fab 18A is probably the last remnant of Gelsinger. Bu will take credit of course.
The manglement strategy here is to cut costs by firing everyone who might possibly be able to create a viable product, leaving himself and the rest of the C-suite to hoover up all the cash & bonuses and license patents. The concept of actually making money from products people want to buy doesn't appear to be a concept he is interested in, presumably because it entails the hard work of nurturing talent and managing people.
doesn't cut it with hardware dependent software (as it won't) how can Intel to rectify the deficit, conceive of their attracting bright young software engineers to hide their light under Intel's dismal proprietary corporate bushel ?
With all the restructuring and redundancies in the industry I can foresee a critical skills shortage, particularly in this area, within five years.
The older experienced engineers could change career direction (management?), or retire, while the youngest leave the industry completely for new careers.
What contribution actually does Intel towards open-source even? Honest question here though.
Apart from their basically proprietary OneAPI-stuff, at least since their fallout on security (which started around 2014–2015) and especially since their Meltdown by end of 2017, the bulk of their so-called "contribution" into the open-source community, consists of …
a) Mainly trying to get fixes for their own broken hardware into the OSS-space, and preferably pollute the Kernel with Intel-only-fixes (to mitigate any greater fallout of their ever-so-often outright flawed hardware), to the detriment of all others — Ahem, KASLR/RedPoline and that sort of stuff and their shady 'Christmas gift' to the public by end of 2017 comes to mind here, before their Meltdown went public. Simply put, Intel basically demanded to be allowed to cripple the whole Linux-universe via the Kernel, in order to make Intel itself look less bad.
b) In case of OneAPI (to rule 'em all), Intel is constantly trying to bring people and programmers to use their biased compilers and libraries Intel gives away for free (for that precise reason alone; Get 'em hooked on Intel-stuff, to milk them later), which coincidentally produce only software, that runs only at crippled speed on anything else but Intel-hardware itself, and times worse on anything AMD.
–
Speaking of OneAPI …
Intel's widespread OneAPI-stuff like TBB, Embree, MKL and whatnot and their age-old load of libs, has only been 'open', since they try to spread a software-basis, which runs best only on Intel-hardware, while de facto destroying performance on and for all other vendors' hardware with crippling execution-paths at runtime purely out of spite when run on anything but Intel — It's basically a sneaky continuation of their age-old trying to corrupt the world-wide software-landscape at its root in Intel's favour alone, when giving away their Intel Compiler for free. Eff that corrupt unethical sh!t.
–
The same intention was it with their own Linux-flavour Clear Linux from the very start, which Intel got quickly caught right in the act, to 'accidentally' cripple it on AMD-CPUs again. … and when they couldn't bring the Linux-world to run their biased Clear Linux, they lost every drive to maintain it any further and basically abandoned it ages ago, until it got completely knifed recently — When other distributions picked up already existing compiler-flags for optimisations (which Intel did exactly nothing to even exist in the first place), to speed up things for their own CPUs (especially after AMD's Ryzen hit in harder than expected), Intel's maintainer got quite salty over it.
—
In any case, submitting Kernel-patches to even make your own flawed hardware work as intended in the first place, isn't called 'contribution', much less a selfless one. That's called »The bare minimum!«.
Though it just goes to show, that the ever-snob crowd in their high cloud-castle in Santa Clara, is as arrogant as ever – Seems even their massive downfall since 2017 and AMD's Ryzen couldn't humble any of them and they still see themselves as the self-crowned »Emperor of Semiconductors« and as the hub of the iUniverse.
Intel obviously needs way more humbling and really hasn't fallen from grace enough yet.
Sorry chipzilla, but it's an AMD64 world now. You're not calling the shots. Thanks to Itanium (aka "Intel Micro Channel") you lost your exclusive control and are now forever trapped in a cross licensing patent pool with AMD.
Linux has become the fabric of standard computing because it isn't owned by any one company. You would do well to adapt to the same on the hardware side.
