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

High end is the idea

[cansecofan22]

Just think about it. Linux has the potential to take the market theat Solaris, AIX and HPUX have had for years. If Intel and AMD can get Linux apps to perform as well or better than the properitary OS's then they stand to make money because it will be there hardware in the boxes, not Sun HP or IBM. It would just seem to make sence to do what they are doing.

I wish there was a spell checker plugin for /. posts :-)

Re:High end is the idea

[Asic Eng]

And lets face it, if you can afford a 500K machine, I don't think a copy of Solaris will break the bank.

That's true, but most Solaris machines don't cost anywhere near that.

The SUN Blade on my desk has a single board and CPU in it, and two (non-redundant) hard drives, if I unplug any of these pieces, the system will stop. :)

Now I admit SUN makes a lot nicer machines than this one, so I certainly see your point, but a lot of the machines in the SUN/HP range could be replaced with x86 boxes. And SUN is way overpriced for the kind of performance it provides.

linux and chip-makers

[dollargonzo]

What are people these days using computers for? What drives the market for high speed chips? --Games; That is what people are using windows for; if a chipmaker can say that their chips are specially designed for l00nix, then people will buy it, and start using l00nix more. The main problem with this trend is the fact that a windows user cannot at this point in time install and use l00nix like windows: stick in the CD, and sit back and relax for a while while the OS installs. l00nix is great for tweakers, hackers, and just plain h4rd-c0r3 people, but it is not ready for the general market, it is TOO custom. If tweaked enough, it WILL work on just about any configuration and system, but that is not good enough for gamers. If someone went the extra step and made l00nix more usable to the general public (I love it, I use little else, but i LIKE to tweak), THEN we could blow windows away... (although admittedly, GNOME is a good start). I am not saying making it necessarily more windows like, just more available in terms of usage. However, chipmakers starting the trend for "designed for l00nix" is most definetely good.

No Integration

[piecewise]

Although certainly having a specially-designed chip for Linux systems would be nice, Linux will forever be fragmented in the nature of its architecture simply because of its open-source design. So I think the primary source of reliability will come from the kernel and entire system itself, not so much from the chip on which it runs. And clearly, one of Linux's strongpoints has been its portability across chip designs. I can run Linux on my G4.. but also on a P3 system, if I were so inclined. There are so many Linux-based OSes out there these days.

Also, are the chip companies even targeting Linux? It seems to me that they're interested in open-source. But open-source does not mean Linux. Open-source is much larger as a concept than Linux is. And of course, I imagine that the future will be this: open-source programmers will be lured away by dollar signs (not in a bad way -- but hey, everyone's gotta eat). The companies will have a vested interest in making sure that these programmers are not working on things outside of the company itself, and in fact will also require that parts of the systems they develop will be proprietary. Just like Apple does. Darwin is open-source, but Aqua, Quartz, etc., are proprietary systems. And Apple nabbed the top guy for BSD, did they not?

I'm rambling now. But what I'm saying, basically, is that although i think this is primarily a good thing, the waters are still very muddy and the trail itself extends very far out.

Linux vs Microsoft

[Pink Daisy]

According to the article, the hardware vendors are looking to Linux to force Microsoft to adopt new features. That's a strong testament to the power of competition! I know that Intel has hated their dependence upon Microsoft for a long time, and that Microsoft is delerious about AMD, since it untied them from Intel.

AMD really needs Linux on the hammer platform. Actually, they need Windows as well, but Linux is the club to force Microsoft to make the port. Intel is less dependent on Microsoft for the success of IA64 platforms, but mainstream adoption of new technologies like SMT (or hyperthreading, as they say) could really distinguish them from AMD performance-wise.

I'm usually pro-Microsoft around here, given the amount of nonsense Linux-propoganda spewed out, but I will be really happy when Linux can compete across the board, instead of just on servers. The benefits of competition are very high.

custom hard ware.

[Error27]

>>Surely the high end market should see the potential advantages in migrating to systems running on hardware custom built for Linux?

Oddly enough, I can't think of any advantage. The trend in high end computing recently seems to be to move to commodity hardware. We have clusters of x86 machines. SGI is moving to an Intel platform. And Compaq has sold the Alpha to Intel.

I could be wrong of course...

Software personality

[Alien54]

I was up way too late last night, so this is not going to be all that coherant. not that what I say is all that often.

This is just a reflection on the root cause of the obvious success that Linux continues to have, as evidenced by this story.

Somehow I think that the personality of the main visionary behind a piece of software does occasionally express itself in the software in certain subtle ways.

In The case of Linux vs MS, where people want to contribute their energies to some degree, where people give things to the project. This vs MS where alot of people do not want to contribute and where resources are boughtr, paid for, and taken.

Alot of this has to do with the social agreements regarding what is right and normal and just behavior for capitalism, big business, etc. It's what "everyone does". But this seems to be changing with the model of contribution and community help.

This community help model requires more healthy and alive community to work well, while the typical capitalist model can work in a perverse way with criminal types who steal resources. In fact, it can be difficult to avoid.

We eventually come to the point where we have the successes that we have today.

and we can say, with some logic, that the two operating systems and the companies, etc reflect the main personalites involved. Linux is much more community oriented, while MS is more imperial (or something), in its own way.

- - -
Radio Free Nation
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
- - -

Speaking of compilers...

[wazzzup]

I've noticed that Mandrake 8.0 claims to be optimized for the G3 processor. Does this mean that gcc now has PowerPC optimizations? From what I've understood Linux on PowerPC (and possibly other architectures) was somewhat hobbled by the lack of decent PowerPC code generated from the compiler and that gcc pretty much only optimizes for the x86 architecture. Are there compilers out there readily available that now optimize for PowerPC?

Re:Shouldn't be the other way around ?

[basking2]

I think the finer point is being missed. By designing hardware around Linux, Linux will not be bound that architechure, but will run really well when compiled on that architechure

Take Macs for instance. Apple does a lot of graphic stuff which need a lot of floating point and so they have a G4 chips which does floating point really well. You can do graphic stuff on a Pentium or a Ultra or some other chip, but it's not really built with the graphics model in mind.
Similar issues come up with a system like Linux. Graphics aren't as important. Process switching becomes an issue, mutext and shared memory becomes a major point!
Look at Windows. It is, for most issues, a single user environment. Mutext is still very important, but not encountered NEARlY as much as it is in a Unix system running 200+ processes with 150+ user id's all grabbing for the same system resources.
I've skipped around a bit and I hope this makes sense. :-) I really would like to just post a really BIG architechture book, but I don't think the publishers would let me. :-)

Virtualisation

[AirSupply]

Oddly enough, I was thinking earlier today about a feature that I'd like to see in x86-type CPUs that ain't there yet. I've no idea as to its feasibility, and it might not even be useful, but I'll throw it out into the open here in the hopes that someone else will praise it and run with it, or smack it down and stop me wasting further brain cycles on it.

The feature in question is better support for virtualisation. I'm led to understand that half the reason projects like Plex86 and proprietary products like VMWare are so clever is that the x86 doesn't lend itself to virtualisation. You can't necessarily retrofit virtualisation, but I suspect you could wrap it around the existing architecture.

What I imagine this to look like in actual practice is a CPU that boots up in a mode where it's just a typical x86, but has a set of extra commands for creating and managing virtual x86en. A virtualisation-aware OS could then use these (privileged, I suppose) commands to initialise and execute virtual machines. Certain exceptions (configured at VM initialisation) would cause the virtual machine to break right back out to the real machine, dumping the virtual machine status in an appropriate location for later restoration.

Clearly there's a largish book worth of details I've left out, but this is just meant to be a seminal idea. I don't even pretend to have any real knowledge of the x86 architecture, specifically.

How would this help Linux? Well hey -- with a little bit of added tweaking, Linux could have 90% of the functionality of VMWare built into it. There are many other applications of virtualisation, and its addition to the core of Linux could make for some interesting possibilities. One application that springs to mind is the idea of having "multi-root" systems, where users can have their own root access to their own virtual system. If the virtualisation commands were also available in the virtual x86, then "virtual" would be a relative concept, and the root user of a virtual system could create more virtual systems of his own.

I think it's a good idea. Now bring on the applause and the clue-sticks.

Re:Future? What about now?

[stripes]

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?

In the past Intel (at least) has done major work on gcc. The first time I remember seeing anything about it they dumped a ton of patches off and they were wrong. There were a lot of Intel-specific patches in the machine independent parts, and lots of machine independent parts in the x86 only part.

The patches were not accepted (someone did fork off a pgcc or something like that for a while). Much of that work has been re-done right in egcs (now gcc 3).

I don't know if they have been contributing a lot recently, with luck they will get the two messages "smaller patches tend to be better", and "stick with the framework (we'll give help if you ask)".

Apple does seem to have learned. A lot of their patches made it into egcs. Unfortunitly their pre-compiled headers code didn't make it in (it is in their gcc that they ship), maybe for 3.1...

Re: Why not SPARC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good design costs a lot of money, and well designed parts will cost more to make. Well designed parts will have more layers in the epoxy pcb, gold plated contacts, mil-spec chips, carefully thought-out design which keeps standing waves and impedance/unit length down, and so on. PC's DO NOT have well designed parts. Paraphrasing Eric Raymond's Hardware Howto, if most of the units barely work, in most machines, under light use, it's good enough for the PC market.

By the way, one doesn't test everything; it is enough to test a sample, and every manufacturer (execept the very worst) does that. If the sample is made large enough, you can drive the failure rate arbitrarily low. If the sample is made small (and thus cheap) enough, the large failure rate can be accepted, in the pc market. If it doesn't work, the customers will just return it. If it fails the day after the warrenty runs out, that's bonus.