Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel acquires Linutronix

community.intel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 139 posts

Re: Intel acquires Linutronix

#121

Post by _carbyau_ »

bnjms wrote: post #113
dannyw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Rent seeking basically. By never actually selling something they can demand an ongoing stream of revenue.

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.

Re: Intel acquires Linutronix

#122

Post by fomine3 »

zmk5 wrote: post #50
hansendc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for your hard work!

Intel is doing the best to support Linux ecosystem. I wish other growing chip manufacturer follow them.

Re: Intel acquires Linutronix

#123

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

rbanffy wrote: post #116
teekert wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]: h…

> 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.

I'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.

Re: Intel acquires Linutronix

#124

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

exikyut wrote: post #97
danuker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 app…

I don't think anybody object to binning CPUs based on what the chip can actually do. It's when Intel decides to sell chips with features fused off even though the silicon is fully functional that people start to get annoyed.

Re: Intel acquires Linutronix

#125

Post by robwwilliams »

bee_rider wrote: post #51
bestouff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their current CPU-features-as-a-service marketing push doesn't look like a right move to me.

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.

It would be interesting to rephrase many of these HN comments in the context of a general purpose home robot. Or a Tesla. I take all of this for granted already for Tesla.

For a general purpose robot I might want baby sitting one year and health care provider another year.

Re: Intel acquires Linutronix

#126

Post by dboreham »

formerly_proven wrote: post #108
exikyut wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enter…

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, h…

I believe in the relevant circles this is called "utility based pricing".

Re: Intel acquires Linutronix

#127

Post by exikyut »

jfoutz wrote: post #110
formerly_proven wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, h…

OOOHHH! kinda curious, if I create a byte stream that's larger when compressed, do they pay me?

*Facepalms in "when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure"*

Re: Intel acquires Linutronix

#128

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

tediousdemise wrote: post #66
dannyw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This will suck until enthusiasts figure out how to jailbreak the processors to unlock maximum speeds.

haah. jokes on you. the next time you unlock your cpu, intel would dmca you and charge your with a felony. or more seriously, "warranty void if unlocked" meaning you would be penalized with not getting any warranty cover if you remove the sticker, kinda like android oems who do not let you unlock the bootloader or let you install custom roms because "security". microsoft pluto(pluton?) seems to be the step in this direction imo

Re: Intel acquires Linutronix

#129

Post by milsorgen »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #121
bnjms wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rent seeking basically. By never actually selling something they can demand an ongoing stream of revenue. 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 w…

You will own nothing and you will be happy.

Re: Intel acquires Linutronix

#130

Post by ksec »

caleb-allen wrote: post #2

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).

People were extremely skeptical of Pat on HN not long ago. Glad to see some positive comments.
Post reply on HN