Intel CPU Temperature Monitoring Driver For Linux Now Unmaintained After Layoffs
Intel CPU Temperature Monitoring Driver For Linux Now Unmaintained After Layoffs
Coretemp and Ethernet. Also a few years ago the guy that maintained meshcentral (the only reason to pay extra $$$ for having Intel vPro compatibile computers in the workspace)
Basically this tells their biggest customers "next server needs to be based on AMD epyc"
How much money they could possibly "save" with those THREE salaries? Just cut one week of travel with private jet for the C class and the same savings are served
But how else is the CEO going to cheat on his wife? Cold play concerts are def out of the picture now.
Mass layoffs are never done in a thoughtful way. It's often the C-suite telling each division "cut x number of staff underneath you". That order is filtered down through layers of management until it gets to the people who do actual work. If they're lucky, they can negotiate some room on their team with one or two layers of management above them, but it just means another team underneath the same management layer is getting hit that much more.
Remember that when a CEO says "we had to make the hard but necessary decision". All that asshole had to do was say "cut 10,000 people" and filter that order down the stack. All the actual hard decisions were made far, far away from the board of directors.
So, their chips become unsuitable for enterprise servers. Datacenters avoiding them and buying AMD. Intel losing enterprise market share and revenue. Reduced revenue causes next layoffs, probably again people working on things that keep the business working. Shoots itself in the foot and being surprised about the consequences.
IMO, Intel is circling the drain and will die without intervention. And their death will have some pretty crazy ramifications.
If the US had competent leaders, they’d realize Intel was important to global security, and they’d come up with some sort of way to break up the fab and design business.
No one wants to send their designs to Intel’s fab because they don’t want Intel to copy their homework. That’s why Intel’s design competitors use TSMC. And TSMC scales faster because of increased money and experience.
Trump's 100% tariffs on chips made outside the USA is puzzling. It it an attempt to force Intel, who do make chips in the USA, to become more competitive just through bullying everyone? Or does he know it will just cause more trouble and is he trying to drive Intel into the ground for revenge because they took Biden's money? Why is he also demanding that Intel's CEO resign? Does none of it make sense because Trump is a crazy old narcissist who has lost touch with reality and is now losing his mind?
there is no real rationale. Trump is all impulse, no long range thinking/planning.
Trump loooves to take action. Coherent plan or direction is irrelevant.
Good luck US, still some to go.
The tariff thing just shows that Trump doesn’t understand why people use TSMC. TSMC doesn’t have a brand of chips that they sell, and they can’t copy your designs.
Companies don’t manufacture with Intel because Intel isn’t just their manufacturer, it’s their competitor. Also, Intel’s fab is now behind the curve. It literally can’t manufacture some of the shit Apple and Nvidia want.
Trump sees a rash and is prescribing cortisone cream. But the skin irritation is from melanoma.
There's no way politicians will let one of the most important chip manufacturers die. If push comes to shove, they'll get subsidies
.... Have you seen the competence of the politicians on display in the US right now?
Didn't the orange one threaten tsmc to buy 49% of Intel or will get higher tariffs?
Probably not, but these morons will probably wait until too much damage is done. They’re shortsighted AF.
or they will just move overseas.
When I got a new desktop PC this year I specifically avoided anything with Intel in it because of how bad they dropped the ball with their GPUs basically disintegrating.
This is just a small glimpse into how Intel is breaking down from the inside. It may take a few years but if the US government doesn't intervene somehow on their behalf I truly think Intel might be done for in the next 5 years.
But if history is any indicator, they will. "Too big to fail!"
What's crazy is, people will say "See how capitalism fails us?" when that is socialized capitalism. The government should not be bailing out any companies. If they can't survive without government money, they don't need to exist.
socialized capitalism
I think I understand your complaint, but I'd say "free market" rather than "capitalism". But regardless of what we call it, it doesn't actually exist unless you have a more powerful external system regulating it.
Start with a truly free-market capitalist system. One company manages to temporarily pull ahead (through luck and skill). The rational thing for the company to do isn't "make better products" (that's hard) but "destroy competing companies" (much easier). And the end-product would be that the company becomes a government so it can force consumers to pay.
So I'd argue that socialized capitalism (which I'm picturing as a socialist system that permits certain specific free markets and handles the fallout of business failures) is what you actually want.
Imagine if x86-64 got blown open because of it? Might literally be the best thing to happen to computing in like 40 years.
Really fuckin' doubt it'll happen, but a girl can dream XP
Or, what if it just became irrelevant. It's had a great run. But honestly ARM has shown plenty of versatility and power. While being licensable unlike x86. And things like riscv have similar of not better potential.
The base x86-64 patents expired in 2021. Also, it was held by AMD, not Intel.
However, there are a lot of extensions that are still under patent. You can make an x86-64 processor the way it was when Opteron was released in 2003, but it won't be competitive with current offerings. Those extensions are patented by a mix of both Intel and AMD. Intel failing isn't going to fully open x86-64.
Edit: also, it's not just the patents, it's the people. Via is still technically out there and could theoretically make its own x86-64 to modern standards. However, x86-64 is a very difficult architecture to optimize, and all the people who know how to do it already work for either Intel or AMD. Actually, they might only work for AMD, even before the layoffs.
Thank you. Thank you for giving me hope lol
Arent their dGPU supposed to be pretty good?
Mostly nontechnical person here: how much active maintenance does this driver need? To the uninitiated, it sounds like it should be basic and standard.
Not much, but it does need to be maintained. Every time someone pushes an update to code that the driver uses, something changes in the Linux kernel, or Intel releases be hardware that needs a different register map or whatever, the driver will fail. If nobody steps up to maintain it, it could stop working in a matter of months.
Okay, thanks!
This doesn't sound like a 40-hour per week kind of a job
I doubt maintaining a single deriver was their only responsibility.
Their "real" job was some standard cog-in-the-machine engineering work, which is why they got laid off. Just another number.
Most open-source work happens outside of corporate planning and so it's invisible to the company. When the reality is, it would absolutely be worth it to Intel to pay a 40/w salary just to maintain this little bit of code. The value is there, but the humans running the company would never be able to get over the hurdle of "he's not working very hard so he doesn't deserve the money."
So just stick with what I've been doing and avoid Intel? Got it.
AMD all the way baby!
Sure, but in the meantime I need to work with what I have... which is Intel (on some machines, at least).
Nothing wrong with that, but when given the choice... I'll go AMD. I think I bought an i5 one time only in my life and I'm old.
Without Intel processors, Linux wouldn't have been possible in the first place.
But today we have good processors from many different manufacturers. The Linux community must, and can, stay alive even without the support of one major player.
We don't have that many other processors, though. If you look at the desktop, there is AMD and there is Apple silicon which is restricted to Apple products. And then there is nothing. If Intel goes under ground, AMD might become next Intel. It's time (for EU) to invest heavily into RISC-V, the entire stack.
ARMs are coming. RISCV are coming. Some Chinese brands have been seen, too.
If you look at the desktop, there is AMD and there is Apple silicon
You can get workstations with Ampere Altra CPUs that use an ARM ISA. It's not significant in the market, more of a server CPU put in a desktop for developers, but it provides a starting point, from which you could cut down the core count and try to boost the clocks.
There is also the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus with some laptops on the market from mainstream brands already (Asus Zenbook A14, Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6, Dell Inspiron 5441). That conversely could probably scale up to a desktop design fairly quickly.
You're right that we're not there, but I don't think we're that far off either. If Intel keeled over there would be a race to fill the gap and they wouldn't leave the market to AMD alone.
There is ARM also found on apple,raspberry pi,Orange Pi but those are SBCS(except apple) they can always be turned into normal laptops and desktops and such.
The only problem with ARM its a closed ISA like X64.
The only Problem with both ARM AND RISC-V They are RISC not CISC like x64 so better power consumption with lower clock speeds, bad for desktop great for laptops and such.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Why did Linux need Intel processors specifically?
The PC was new. There were only Intels in PCs. Linux was made for the PC.
Backstory: Prof. Tanenbaum was teaching operating systems. His example was MINIX (his own academic example). This motivated one student to try to make a new operating system for PCs, doing some things like the professor, and other things quite differently. This student knew the specifics of the Intels and used them good for performance etc.
Stop buying Intel products, got it thanks!
Hey this is kind of interesting since I just met up with my friend who works for Intel today for his kids first birthday and he was telling me about this issue and how they're trying to get him to be part of a related team (not specifically related to Linux) on top of his other responsibilities...
He went on at some length describing how absolutely absurd the whole structure was of related systems and how it's a miracle any of it works lol
Another reason to go for Amd
I've been a gushing fanboy since I had a discount $200 laptop that ran mass effect 3 with an integrated GPU.
The problems at Intel haven't even begun. When a big company does layoffs like that, there's a certain amount of institutional knowledge that just evaporates.
There are going to be a large amount of dropped balls at Intel and this is just one of them.
Sadly, I think instead of the market responding and Intel going under, Intel will mutate into a government subsidized technology company. At least for the present moment, they serve as an example of what could be domestic manufacturing.
To me, their attitudes strongly resemble Blackberry just prior to the iPhone coming out. They have a certain amount of arrogance and are resting on past glories. It's pretty clear that just cranking up the wattage and shipping a new product isn't a path they can walk forever.
It's a shame that Intel was actually on a plan to get things fixed up. Their former CEO pay Gelsinger had told them they had to endure some years of pain before things would be better. Unfortunately, the board was not so tolerant and kicked him out before the plan was fully realized.
Their board has some really questionable members on it too, so all around not a very good situation. Probably the only thing in Intel's favor is that starting a new microprocessor company isn't just something you do in the basement, so they have some room to turn the ship around.