Slashdot Mirror
Intel Warns Asia Over Linux Plan
rimbaldi writes "Intel's CEO, Craig Barrett recently warned the Chinese government that their attempt to create regional standards for computers and communications, including standards using Linux-based software, may be doomed to failure, since 'such a strategy might protect local companies and markets in the short term, [but] it would make it more difficult for Asian companies to participate in world markets.' This is in reaction to earlier Slashdot-covered stories about an Asian software consortium and China disallowing foreign software."
it is just really funny to see a multinational company watching out for the interests of one the largest potential new markets by stating that they won't be able to compete ten to twenty years from now. FUD.
a slut did tulsa
Is Intel pushing MS Windows now?
Intel > procs and chipsets > DRM > MS Windows
I know, Linux machines use intel processors, too. But unless I'm mistaken, intel and MS are pretty closely aligned. It doesn't seem like a very unbiased party, hence the analogy.
philcrissman.com.
This really doesn't strike me as a free trade issue, but thats the way the big American companies are spinning it. Their just trying to tap the popular momentum against "protectionist economics", when in reality, the real issue is simply taking a shot at making their own standards.
China has been looking for ways for a decade now to stick it to the US economy. Someone over there must think that they can have a measurable effect on world PC standards.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
USA = 200-300 million people (approx)
Europe = 200-300 million people (approx)
China = more than 1000 million people
So, who is the "rest of the world"?
Or it would be, if nobody like the Chinese got uppity. Planning to go with non-TCPA software is certainly Not Part of the Plan, and could derail all of Intel's plans.
That just can't be allowed now, can it?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
short term : chinese jobs are protected
middle term : West is implementing trusted,drm compliant, whatever systems. China cannot sell (unlawful material, because open)
long term : illegality considered illegal barrier to trade by wto. West can use free chinese programs/systems. Intel & Microsoft become irrelevants
One can always dream...
> He's talking about chinese plans to try to grow their own (non x86) chip market through protectionist policies
> The high costs of such a two-pronged approach would make it difficult to compete. "You have to ask yourself this: is there an advantage to having a proprietary standard in your country?"
First, protectionism is everywhere. It is very hipocritical of the US to protect its agriculture and job markets, and then expect everyone else to continue to either import or pay royalties on its chips and software.
Second, this particular piece of protectionism could actually lead to something. If one takes a potentially more efficient and cheaper RISC system, and uses it to run GNU/Linux, he can makes dirty cheap, open systems accessible to millions. One could even see this as a linchpin for the end of proprietary systems dominance, both software and hardware -- yes, x86 is proprietary. In this case, China and its partners in potential would be protecting not a closed market, but a nascent, open industry from dumping, IP claims and similar anticompetitive tatics from US companies.
Now, how MIPS is anymore proprietary than x86 I fail to see. Quite to the contrary.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
The parent to this comment has an extremely good point - without Linux, they would have to start from scratch writing an OS for their new chip.
With Linux, all they have to do is write a good compiler.
Privacy begins with
But the world puts up with it because of the shitty, Dollar store trinkets that they produce. They start producing other things that can put a dent in the economy, then you can bet that there would be heavy pressure on their government to stop.
Also, at what point would the people stop being walked all over? Once China has a huge economy, capitalist, communist or otherwise, if the wealth is not spread a bit more than now (which has gotten better than ten years ago), the people just might wise up.
Actually... leaving a lot of folks out of the loop with empty pockets - not only the company owners but many working class blokes are already out of jobs due to outsourcing.
The odds are, the talent and labor will not significantly increase in standard of living anytime soon. This leads to developing nations with large, cheap labor pools with infrastructure and knowledge to compete in the global marketplace. Right now, the USA is facing a crisis of outsourcing of technical jobs (computer related mostly) and many people are in denial. Eventually (if not so far off from now), Europe will be facing the same thing. Developing nations are getting tons of educational subsidies and material for free in the form of Linux and OSS and strengthening themselves for little cost. Eventually, they get to the point of being recipients for outsourcing jobs, taking the jobs of those who contributed to them - all at little cost. What a deal!
I agree that the headline of the Financial Times is grossly misleading, but for fewer reasons: simply because none of the quotes from Barrett even mention Linux, so there's no reason to believe he isn't just talking about the asian CPU plans.
Even if you didn't read the rest of the article, it's clear he's talking about "proprietary standards," which linux clearly is not.
Here, however, I'm not so sure. Just because something is "clearly" true to you, me, or anyone else capable of handling a dictionary and boolean logic doesn't mean it's necessarily clear to a business executive. Have you read Darl McBride's open letter? Jonathan Schwartz's eWeek interview? Perhaps Craig Barrett has also fallen into this expanding black hole from whence no rational thought can escape.
If you dig a bit deeper into Intel's financials, you'll find that China represents a huge chunk of Intel's growth since 2000--while their total revenue has dropped from 33.7 billion to 26.7 billion, revenue from China has increased from 2.15 billion to 3.2 billion.
In 2000, China was about 6.3% of Intel's total revenue. Today, it's nearly double that. If China's plans succeed, Intel loses both a sizeable chunk of their revenue and one of their biggest growth markets.
Sorry, did I say 'one of their biggest growth markets'? I meant 'biggest'.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Basically China is well on the way to becoming a larger economy than either the US or EU. Other regional powers like India and Indonesia have a strong incentive to go along with a China/Japan/South Korea backed standard---quite simply it will be cheaper. There are also quite a few places in the world that would rather no rely on US based technology(i.e. The Islamic world and some of Latin America/Africa fit that category)
Now, I suspect that at first, this new Asian/Linux standard won't be markedly higher performance or more visually attractive than the Wintel standard. However, if this Asian consortium honors its copyleft obligations, we'll see a large block of mission critical applications running under Linux that can be evaluated by a recompile on radically different hardware. (i.e. we will see stuff like decent, enterprise level database applications on this Linux platform-and the Chinese government may find it in their interests to just fund the existing open source projects rather than going to folks like Oracle).
There is already magic sitting around that has the potential to eat Intel's lunch. In particular, I like the stuff that Chuck more has done with Colorforth and his Forth processors. Those designs are at present taylored for very low power applications-but given proper incentives, someone might figure out how to do something with a lot more power than current desktop designs. This Asian initiative means that the the software for real, mission-critical applications could be available for an appropriate recompile.
China is just the ultimate "big customer". They are big enought that they don't have to cater to Intel or Microsoft. By choosing Linux, China is empowering a software constituency that is capable of beating Wintel technologically. The likely end result is that Wintel will find themselves as the technological backwater. I suspect Microsoft is in a better position to adapt to these changes, but Intel has a serious problem ahead.
My thought was:
"They'll be unable to interoperate with the reat of the world, just like Europeans can't watch American TV shows because they use PAL and not NTSC.
Oh, wait..."
It's quite shocking to me that the top guy at Intel is so fundamentally ignorant of the realities of modern computing and communication.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Exactly. This is the only reason Barrett has taken this position. This has nothing to do with Intel's worry about "proprietary" anything or their concern for Asian software markets. Intel is only worried they will have to adapt to the (massive) emerging market in Asia.
Hi
I just wanted to let you know that we've heard that whiney tripe a million times over.
Fact is, MS has nothing to worry about, so long as linux means a marginally useful desktop, characterized by poor documentation, and an arrogant zit-faced userbase. This will not change any time soon.
MS will always own the desktop, because frankly, noone has ever COMPETED with them on TECHNICAL merit. Only on idealogical merit.
Thank you for your time.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
So firstly, Prescott is 64-bit and Intel needs a 64-bit version of Windows to run on it 'cause hell will freeze over before they use AMD's 64-bit instruction set.
... Intel needs Microsoft big-time or their Prescott will fail. Hmmmmmm.
And then Intel start lecturing Asian countries about being obediant little consumers, and buying Windows, and not cutting off their nose to spite their face by investing in Linux.
What was the first bit again? Oh that's right
Do not make the mistake of confusing ignorance with tactics, or that this is aimed at China. This is aimed squarely at western companies who may be interested in working with or investing in China - the same western companies whose bosses will attach significant weight to anything that issues from the mouth of a well-known CEO.
This isn't an attempt to put china off directly, it's an attempt to put western companies off working with China and lending weight to China's approach (which would surely be disasterous for Intel and Microsoft if it encouraged more countries to implement home-grown hardware and software rather than Wintel supported systems).
It's not an "alliance" by choice. Intel knows that Windows is on 95% of the desktops. All they have to do is write a few new subroutines to detect Intel chips and to degrade the system performance if they wanted to hurt Intel. Look at their recent adoption of AMD's 64 bit ISA. It's their way of telling Intel "You better do what we say, because we can always decide to help out your competition instead of you". There was a big lawsuit about this a while back where Bill directly threatened Barret if they didn't do what MS wanted. Hence why Barret is saying this. It's also part of the reason why one half of Intel is pushing Linux and another what's to hide the first half. They don't want to piss MS off.
Space for rent, inquire within
Whole Asia, including China and India, is already more than half of the world. That's surely enough for them.
And that's surely more than half of the world of computer makers and plants...
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
In addition, U.S. firms will have to be interoperable with AFTA if we hope to continue trading with them. As such, I would assume that U.S. firms would demand that vendors supply equipment interoperable with AFTA standards. If MS is not able to supply such an OS, then the firms will just have to go elsewhere.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Intel has been one of Linux's greatest supporters. It has helped Intel break into the risc dominated unix field with cheap lintel servers.
Infact all the recent Itanium and Pentium4 chips were designed using Linux.
Intel has its own internal LUG that numbers over 10k. They have been working hard to gnu-ify and change the kernel so it can compile on intel's compilers.
If anything this should give Intel an advantage because proprietary chips are more expensive or slower because they can not be produced in bulk like vainilla P4's. Gcc is also most heavily optimized for the intel platform.
http://saveie6.com/