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Intel Builds On Top of Android, But Hedges On Open-Sourcing Improvements
Barence writes with this news as carried by PC Pro: "Intel claims it is making significant improvements to the multicore performance of Android — but isn't sure if it's willing to share them with the open-source community. Speaking to journalists in London, Intel's mobile chief Mike Bell said that Intel's engineers were making significant improvements to Android's scheduler to improve its multicore performance. 'Android doesn't make as effective use of multicore as it could,' he said. However, when pressed by PC Pro on whether those improvements would be shared with the open-source community and Intel's competitors, Bell remained non-committal. 'Where we are required to give back to open source, we do,' said Bell. 'In cases where it's not required to be open source, I'm going to think about it. I don't like doing R&D for competitors if they're not going to contribute themselves,' said Bell, before adding that 'in general, our philosophy is to give things back.'"
'Where we are required to give back to open source, we do... In cases where it's not required to be open source, I'm going to think about it. I don't like doing R&D for competitors if they're not going to contribute themselves,"
I'm glad to see that altruism is still alive and well, when it's required and only based off other people's work.
In essence I guess that's what they are saying: Intel will develop improved multicore handling for Android, but keep the ideas they develop in house. Nothing wrong with that I guess.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
The whole article reeks of PR and marketspeak. "Of course we can do better than everyone else", "no way is ARM going to beat us, our single core is better than their dual-core!"
My response to Intel is to put up or shut up. Or be ignored, since I know they won't do the latter (they didn't get to be a 100+ billion dollar company by not marketing the hell out of their product).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Android is built upon the Linux kernel and userland.You would think that the performance he was talking about would be in the kernel itself, not the Android stack. Unless he was talking about how badly Android (and by extension, Java) operated on a multi-core or hyper-threaded processor., but otherwise, wouldn't the improvements would be given back to the Linux kernel as processor improvements, something that Intel has always done in the past
Mike Bell is talking about something he says Intel is"working on, not something that Intel is shipping or even something that he claims is totally functional and free of bugs. There's a big distinction between "we're greedy bastards" and "we're not releasing source to beta versions of undistributed software." I think the summary could reflect better.
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_soup Intel of all comnpanies should know how this works.
"I don't like doing R&D for competitors if they're not going to contribute themselves,' said Bell, before adding that 'in general, our philosophy is to give things back.'" ...but...Mr. Bell, that OS that you are making improvements to is, itself, a contribution. That's how open source works. Google has already "given back" by creating it. Now it's your turn...IF that's truly your philosophy. If it's not, that's fine...your improvements are indeed your intellectual property...but don't try to justify charging for it by making it seem that you are doing something a competitor isn't.
...people would be discussing possible areas where Android could be improved. But since slashdot is dead, and mainly targets the brain dead, what we get is a bunch of garbage out the merits of various licenses which is only indirectly related to the topic at hand.
Damn slashdot sucks these days.
How many Chinese ARM OEMs are giving back to the Open Source community? In China Android is forked and Google completely cut out and I haven't seen any of the Chinese "innovations" donated. If they follow the GPL but still manage to produce new innovations that they can protect then good on them.
Oh wait, no, the other one, I mean it is THE shit. The ICC produces the most optimized code out there. It's amazing when you see a test of compilers there is some back and forth among tests, with newer compilers generally being faster than older ones (like Visual Studio 6 is pathetically bad VS 10 is pretty good). Then, above them all, is the ICC. On every test.
So know what? I'm going to say Intel knows something about optimization, perhaps more than anyone else in the world. They may well have some good optimizations.
Also your perception of Intel as just some marketing company is rather stupid. Intel does tons of R&D, real groundbreaking R&D, they throw billions at it where other companies whine abut the cost. Know who has the ONLY commercial 22nm lithography process in the world currently? Intel. They have better tech because they threw tons of money and man hours at it.
They market their shit of course, but acting like what they do is marketing and that they don't do tons of R&D and deliver some amazing products is stupid.
How is it flamebait? Android adoption among handset makers has been built on their ability to customize as needed without having to share those with others. With GPL: Not so much.
I wonder if some of the issue is actually Intel vetting approval from their legal department. A lot of people like to point at Intel engineering and point and say look at all the cool stuff they holding back and only offering as binary blobs. The reality is that their middle management business to business side keeps letting 3rd parties write horrific terms into contracts.
I know with Atom CPU development that the GPU is extremely encumbered by NDAs with PowerVR which prevent Intel from releasing any decent drivers for Linux or Android. There was even one support technician who commented on the fact that he compiled working Android x86 graphics drivers for GMA 500/600 based hardware only to find out from his boss that they could not be released because parts of the code tree where contaminated by bits of PowerVR code. The technician in question goes by "pinebud77" on YouTube and just "PineBud" on pocketables.com. At the time, about 2 years ago, Intel then and up through now, has had to completely rewrite their drivers for GMA graphics on both Windows and *nix platforms due to bad legal agreements. They've had to go so far as to reverse engineer drivers they had already paid for. It has even been questioned how much this killed Meego development in early stages.
I suspect there might be similar bad deals with partners hurting Intel here. The gist I have gotten is that they don't want to withhold drivers or technology, but even when they back up a Brinks truck of cash, they get screwed on contract terms by 3rd parties. The management folks don't have any clue why they might need rights to code they buy from Imagination Technology, Tungsten, or others.
I know the article is related to multi-threading CPU processes, which Intel definitely has a lot of their own engineering invested, but I wouldn't take the "I don't like doing R&D for competitors if they're not going to contribute themselves," as the sole reason. Further, seriously consider the current x86 vs ARM environment. If you look at the article comments and forums at many other tech news sites (namely arstechnica.com and theverge.com) there are a LOT of relatively ignorant people who seem to think various ARM architectures are vastly superior in computing power to x86 and trying to turn it into some kind of architecture holy war on the scale of AMD vs. Intel vs. Cyrix debates of years past. People who actually think that ARM has equivalent processing power to low end i5 CPUs, when top end quad core ARM CPU's can't even match the FPU performance of 4 year old ATOM single cores. It's even harder to explain to those crowds the massive issues ARM has with scaling and multitasking due to huge bandwidth to IO busses bottlenecks. All of these factors give Intel very good reasons not to share their undertakings with competitors who have brainwashed enough masses to no longer need to compete on merits. I'll give various ARM implementations the performance to battery use crown all day, it's a great CPU for something like a smartphone. When I hear derpity derp about ARM for high utilization clusters though, I vomit a bit in my throat.
You got modded flamebait? Seriously? Do people really think all these handset manufacturers addicted to adding their own secret sauce would have embraced Android with open arms if it required them to share all their modifications?
Remember these are cell phone companies we're talking about here - they have a long history of repeatedly selling basically the same product to the same people on a regular basis by adding new "shiny bits" to catch their attention. Now look at all the smartphones out there - aside from a few outliers the hardware is all basically the same, put an updateable OS on them and why would any sane person upgrade until their old phone is obsolete? Just update the OS to get the new shiny bits. That crashing sound you hear is the manufacturers' artificially inflated profit margins collapsing, no sane company in the world is going to toss their traditional (and successful) business model out the window.
Android gave them an OS the could still lock down, even to the point of only getting new software, etc from them (woo-hoo, we can keep the $5 ringtones!), without that the free($) part would be unlikely to have given them a leg in the door - what's a few bucks for an OS on a $300 phone? Far more important that it has to be completely replaced to get the newest shiny bits.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I suspect they're talking Intel+Android products. But a more effective multicore process scheduler that significantly boosts overall performance is likely to be an advantage to any multicore CPU, and Intel is in no hurry to give it away. I don't blame them, if they can tell handset/tablet makers "our CPU plus this binary blob is 30% faster than the nearest ARM competitor" that's going to get them a lot more sales than "our CPU is 10% faster than ARM"
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Should the question regarding "Altruism and Profit" always falls under the "either / or" situation?
Could Altruism and Profit go hand-in-hand?
People are making money off Linux, as we speak.
Though, it's true that there are way too many free-riders out there who contributed nothing but keep on making profits out of the hardwork of others, we can not deny that at times, "Altruism" and "Profit" can and _do_ co-exist
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
'Where we are required to give back to open source, we do,' said Bell. 'In cases where it's not required to be open source, I'm going to think about it.'
OK think about it, Mike, but keep your proprietary, non peer-reviewed crap. I don't want it. And if you feel the need to put some of that crap on your own processors, you can keep those too.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
You are right, my single line intended to make the reader think was a taunt, while your net-coppery is... just asinine.