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Intel acquires Linutronix
- caleb-allen 5y agoIntel 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).
- colinmhayes 5y agoIntel 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.
- cinntaile 5y agoAMD is way more nimble than Intel though, since they're fabless.
- dotancohen 5y agoThat puts them more at the mercy of their suppliers. Replace "nimble" with "not in control".
- pkulak 5y agoAnd I'm more nimble than both because I'm fabless and designless.
- madspindel 5y agoThis seems like a strategic drawback.
- missedthecue 5y agoThis seems like a strategic drawback.
- cinntaile 5y agoWhy? Plenty of chip companies are fabless. Apple is fabless, Nvidia is fabless.
- caleb-allen 5y agoNeither Apple nor Nvidia compete with TSMC, while Intel does
- mhh__ 5y agoIntel 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.
- dmead 5y agoBut they have mba'd themselves to death.
- xadhominemx 5y agoNot really. Intel’s two core issues are engineering failures — process technology and processor architecture
- Symmetry 5y agoAre 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 5y agoBy architecture, I’m referring to trade offs then made for single thread performance vs core count and memory channels
- dmead 5y agoI have a basis peak in my desk that says otherwise.
- noahmasur 5y agoA quick search shows INTC market cap is 184B and AMD is 135B. AMD is worth 73% of Intel.
- colinmhayes 5y agoMy 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-rival-intel-111725905.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amd-is-now-worth-more-than-ri...
- tyrfing 5y agoThey are both a bit over 180B, that AMD number is prior to the XLNX acquisition which was done by issuing stock.
- ZetaZero 5y agoAs of a few minutes ago... AMD: 181.86B INTC: 183.97B
- simpsond 5y agoI 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 5y agoSame 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 5y agoTheir current CPU-features-as-a-service marketing push doesn't look like a right move to me.
- caslon 5y agoIt'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 5y agoCalling 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 5y agoCompanies 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.
- dannyw 5y agoLike 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.
- pinewurst 5y agoReally? Name a single successful Intel acquisition, especially open source.
- belval 5y agoI 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#Acquisitions_and_investments_(2010%E2%80%93present) 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?
- kgc 5y agoMaybe acquihires
- svnt 5y agoThe non-chip business at intel is a sideshow of uncommitted grasping.
- FunkyDuckk 5y agoAltera?
- tinco 5y agoThey bought a drone company that had built a single drone that was better than all competing drones in the market, and then they stopped it. No more support, no more new development, no more production. So senseless.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoMobileye ?
- BeetleB 5y agoBought 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.
- bastardoperator 5y agoAfter working directly with Intel and AMD engineers, my money is on AMD. The amount of planning they're doing is nothing short of incredible.
- Symmetry 5y agoIntel 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 5y agoA 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 5y agoAnd 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-because-of-larrabee-fiasco/ http://vrworld.com/2009/09/18/pat-gelsinger-left-intel-becau...
- ksec 5y agoPeople were extremely skeptical of Pat on HN not long ago. Glad to see some positive comments.
- zmk5 5y agoHopefully 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.
- hansendc 5y agoI 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/linux.git/log/?qt=author&q=linutronix 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 5y agoThanks for your hard work!
- l1k 5y agoThere's a series currently under discussion which failed CI: https://lore.kernel.org/intel-gfx/20211214140301.520464-1-bigeasy@linutronix.de/#t 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/linux.git/log/drivers/gpu/drm/i915?qt=author&q=linutronix 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@linutronix.de/ https://lore.kernel.org/intel-gfx/YgqmfKhwU5spS069@linutroni...
- formerly_proven 5y agoCute Lego digger: https://linutronix.de/videos/Linutronix_Bagger_1080.mp4 https://linutronix.de/videos/Linutronix_Bagger_1080.mp4
- teekert 5y agoThat 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-shell-linux-unplugged-406/ https://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/145067/mars-goes-to-shel...
- jvanderbot 5y agoWhile 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.
- rbanffy 5y ago> 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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoI've heard that you also should care about optimizing the quality of the power supply since power fluctuations or brownouts are apparently what actually kills SD cards. Personally, I just use USB drives because they can boot off of that now, and I treat the device as semi-disposable and assume that I'm going to reimage its thumb drive every few months.
- synergy20 5y agosadly everything intel touched on embedded linux over the years all failed so far,e.g. windriver,yocto,its embedded chip efforts,even ARM,etc.
- taffronaut 5y agoAs 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 5y agoYeah, Intel clearly has no interest in helping RISC-V succeed. https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-invests-in-open-source-risc-v-processors-with-a-billion-dollars-in-new-chip-foundries/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-invests-in-open-source-r...
- gary_0 5y agoIntel 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 5y agoMaybe, 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- svnt 5y agoMaybe he was going to go do something else and they purchased some golden handcuffs and a smooth transition?
- hansendc 5y agoYes, 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_RT-Lack-Of-Funds https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PREEMPT_... (BTW, I work on Intel at Linux).
- dreamcompiler 5y agoWhat 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.
- hegzploit 5y agoIs Linutronix by any way related to Pengutronix? https://www.pengutronix.de https://www.pengutronix.de
- pabs3 5y agoDifferent company, both are in the Linux kernel development space.