Chipmakers Angling For Support

defence budget writes "According to this article at CNet, what once happened with Intel and Microsoft might be happening with Linux, AMD and Intel. Apparently "In a sign of how strategic Linux has become, AMD and Intel are angling to lure open-source programmers to their future chip designs". I cannot see how the low end market will react to this, but surely the high end market should see the potential advantages in migrating to systems running on hardware custom built for Linux?"

Comments

Re: Why not SPARC?

[Bodero]

As for reliabilty, let's not forget that most PC reliability is based on Redmond's spooky OSes

I don't know. I have a Matrox Millenium II that only just started working reliably as of Solaris 8 (or Solaris 7 with patches). It seems that when you do a certain thing to the card, the card stands about a 50% chance of getting confused and hanging the entire PCI bus.

Also inside the same case, I have two Western Digital IDE hard drives that won't both talk on the same bus if you set one of them to master and one to slave. It seems to only work if exactly *one* of them is set to cable select.

I also have an Intel motherboard (which is sitting in a drawer right now) that only allows me to use 64 MB of RAM. I bought that system in 1997. Sun's very first desktop SPARC system (the SPARCstation 1) could expand to 64 MB of RAM, and that was in 1990.

Also in the drawer, I have a Diamond Viper V770 Ultra whose fan has decided to make loud scraping noises. Diamond refused to sell me a replacement part, so I have an approximate match replacement part that I will install when I feel like getting out the soldering iron.

The system that had the Intel motherboard originally came with a Toshiba XM-6102B CD-ROM drive. When I first installed Solaris on that thing, I was afraid the driver was confused, because it was reporting all kinds of errors even though Windows didn't seem to have a problem with the drive at all. As time went on, the drive got worse and worse and eventually reached the point where it took 3 or 4 tries for it to recognize a CD.

All of these experiences with dodgy PC hardware are with *name* *brand* PC hardware that I've taken good care of. And, it's not like I've run through hundreds of systems, either. The amount of PC hardware I have ever owned in my life is not enough to build two working systems.

Basically, my experience with PC hardware is that it's cheaply made, and any given piece of hardware will probably be somewhere between limping along and working almost right but not quite. (Some hardware will just outright break, and some of it will be trouble-free for years and years, too.) Overall, I think this is a symptom of the fact that most PC consumers don't know to expect better, and also the pressure to make things as cheap as possible.

There is a lot of stuff out there that is just crap, and there is a lot of stuff out that there sort of works and sort of doesn't. Yes, you can get high quality PC parts, but the fact is that you have to be pretty choosy about it. Which brings me to my next point...

And let's not forget that practically everything in a Blade 100 is off-the-shelf PC parts, so that theory goes out the window.

I tend to think that the Blade 100 is going to be better built than a system you'd buy from some PC vendor, because Sun's attitude is different. Few manufacturers of any complex product like a computer actually make most of the stuff themselves. The reason Sun systems are reliable is that they select good parts, and test the system together as a whole. They have never controlled the whole process, but they do control more of the process for their machines than PC manufacturers do. I think this is what's going to lead to better quality.

(Part of the reason I think that is that it's my belief that one of the reasons PC hardware and software is so unreliable is the size of the market. It's prohibitively expensive to test everything with everything, and not only that, but it's also just very chaotic. It's difficult to make a system work well under those conditions. Sun doesn't suffer from that problem as much because their market is smaller and not only that but simpler.)

Processor optimization and the open/free community

[jensend]

What Intel and AMD are really looking for is not as much for their products to conform to Linux as for Linux to conform to their products. Neither is a bad idea. However, the failure of the community to band together behind GCC 3, fix the major bugs, and get distros and other major software compiled with processor optimizations is going to cause these moves by the processor companies to fade away. A message to all developers everywhere: Help now with what you can in order to get code to compile cleanly on GCC 3!

What's the point?

[nougatmachine]

OK, so chip manufacturers are starting to pay more attention to Linux. Sure, that's great, but what's with the comment about hardware "custom-built" for Linux? Isn't the whole point of open architecture that you can run darn near any operating system on it, including one you just wrote yourself, if you were so inclined? How would a "custom-built" Linux system be any different from the chip architecture it's running on? Linux can even run on closed systems like Macs, for crying out loud. It's not like it particularly needs it's own architecture. Matter of fact, that could be a barrier to entry. Say Joe User wants to try an alternative operating system, and he's narrowed it down to a choice between Linux and Mac OS X. One of the attractive things about Linux is that he doesn't need to buy new hardware to run it.

Bearing all that in mind, why does anyone need custom Linux hardware?

Re:What's the point?

[Tim C]

In the past, Microsoft and Intel have worked together to produce software and hardware that complement each other.

This can go beyond merely understanding the best way to structure an executable, or tips and tricks for hand-coding assembler.

On the one hand, Intel could say to MS "we'd really like to push this new instruction set that we've come up with", so MS say "okay, we'll build support for it into the next DirectX release".

Alternatively, MS could say "we'd really like to get into the streaming multimedia market, could you help us out?"

The upshot is that Intel gets support for their latest, expensive features at the OS level, whilst MS get hardware-level optimization for apps they want to write. Wrap the exact details in an NDA or two, and bingo - Windows runs better on Intel hardware, and Intel hardware runs Windows better. (ie Linux on Intel, and Windows on AMD just aren't as good)

Yes, the whole point is that you can run any OS on any hardware, but sometimes it pays to have a little help.

Cheers,

Tim

Re:Processor optimization and the open/free commun

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? all major distros are moving toward GCC 3.x in the near future. The standard ABI for C++ means that commercial applications (which are very often designed-by-committee baroque C++ monstrosties) will be much easier to port to linux.

Future? What about now?

[Quixote]

If the chip makers were serious, they would start helping Linux out today. Case in point: gcc. Why don't the chip makers hand over their internal compilers to the GCC developers, so that GCC can produce optimal code for their processor? The SPEC marks for Intel CPUs are always achieved on some internal Intel compiler, that is sometimes available as a module for MSVC++. Why not release the same for Linux? I know Intel is working on it now, but what took them so long? And the same applies to AMD.

Re:Future? What about now?

[adubey]

Because if Intel released it's compilers as open source, anyone (read: AMD) could look at Intel's optimizations and use that to make their chips better.

As we move to RISC VLIW processors, compilers become more and more important.

There is this story in the late 80's of how a lot of independent hardware vendors were choosing MIPS over SPARC because MIPS were perceived as being faster. Sun promptly hired MIPS' compiler team and found that, with their opimizations, the SPARC chips were actually faster. Of couse, by this time the market had moved to MIPS, so MIPS was able to pump more money into hardware R+D...

Re:High end is the idea

[Guignol]

Still, the article is not talking about price as an issue here.
It's the quick availability of an OS for the new chip that matters.
They talk about Microsoft and how they hope having a Linux running their chip should put pressure on them. (they being AMD and Intel)

Shouldn't be the other way around ?

[bockman]

The idea of adapting an hardware architecture to run well for a specific OS sounds awful to me. It should be the other way around, given the more flexibility and and dynamic nature of software(what if Linux changes architecture? Should I buy a new PC?). If a chip maker wants an OS run well on its CPU, should supply plenty of information and support to the OS developers, but NOT warp the CPU architecture to its excclusive advantage.

On a related topic, one of the great points of Linux IMO is that can run on so many architectures. In a dream-world dominated by the Penguin, one could pick up the best h/w platform for its needs, without worring about software compatibility
Therefore, I am worried by anything that restricts the number of platforms on which Linux can run.

Re:Processor optimization and the open/free commun

[aunitt]

Ah... but there is something important you are forgetting - patents.

My understanding is that a lot of the extremely useful optimisations are covered by patents owned by IBM, Intel, Microsoft, etc.

Now if IBM and Intel just opened up those patents then a lot more useful optimisations could be done. Otherwise we have the much more difficult route of the GCC developers having to come up with their own non-infringing optimisations.

Re:linux and chip-makers

[Ripsnorter]

How many windows users actually install windows?
How many are capable of it?

I think the issue isn't how easy the os is to install, or to some extent how easy it is to use, some would argue windows is hard to use. The issue is getting OEMs to sell linux boxen already to rock and roll. Once that happens then more apps will start to appear and linux will apear on more desktops

btw have you installed mandrake lately? its the easyist os I've ever installed, and I've installed everything from BeOS(rip) to DOS 6.22.