What's in it for Intel? [LWN.net]

What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 25, 2008 1:02 UTC (Thu) by sbishop (guest, #33061)
Parent article: Alan Cox is moving on from Red Hat

This doesn't have anything to do with Alan Cox, but I have always wondered what Intel's motivation is to support open-source software, and Linux in particular. Can anyone fill me in?

I don't see how Intel benefits if Linux takes market share from Windows; the hardware is the same. Linux taking market share from Unix probably doesn't do much for Intel either; I expect that if it wasn't Linux in those cases it would be Windows.

Does Intel need to make sure that Linux runs well on its hardware? It would seem to be in the interest of anyone attempting to promote Linux to make sure that it runs well on Intel hardware; in other words, I imagine that it would happen whether or not Intel got involved.

Along with all that, Linux is one way of breathing new life into old hardware, which would seem to be the opposite of what Intel would want.

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What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 25, 2008 1:48 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

As Bdale Garbee put it in his talk about HP & Debian at DebConf8:

http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/20...

They do it for the profit - "Don't ever be confused that something that is being done because we love Debian or because we love open source or free software or something" at about 32 min in.

What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 25, 2008 2:16 UTC (Thu) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link]

Intel is not the only maker of chips to run Linux on! By making sure that Linux can use every feature of their chipsets, and squeezes every bit of speed out of their processors, Intel can become the platform of choice for Linux systems. That way they can take market share from AMD and Via. For Linux users, there's little difference between "Linux runs faster on Intel chips" and "Intel chips are faster".

In addition, there's the effect of software being complementary to hardware. People buy software and hardware together. If Intel can bring the price of software down, then there's more money for the hardware. This will expand their market.

What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 25, 2008 6:14 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

re-read your statement and substatute nVidia for Intel.

now think about the state of video support on Linux

also remember that Intel makes a lot more than just CPUs, they have network cards, video cards, sound cards, etc. each of these needs a driver team at the very least.

In some areas (networking for example) I think they just pay driver development teams.

In other areas (Video for example), they not only pay driver developers, they also pay developers to work on the underlying subsystems to implement new features and better take advantage of the capabilities of the chips

What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 26, 2008 20:29 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (guest, #41334) [Link]

Note that two of the three (ATI and Intel) "big three" already meaningfully cooperate with the open source community (being followed by some other ones -- VIA).

What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 26, 2008 21:03 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

they do now, but for several years Intel was the only one that did. and ATI's cooperation (through AMD) is very recent (recent enough that it hasn't had much impact yet)

What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 26, 2008 21:12 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (guest, #41334) [Link]

Recent? IIRC -- a year and half. And you apparently don't have the right distribution, Dave Airlie provided tons and tons of fixes to -ati driver, and people (mainly) from OpenSuSE created -radeonhd using that information. That's pretty big impact in my books.

What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 26, 2008 21:15 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

great, I thought it was about a year and didn't think that the updates had made it in yet. I'm glad to to be wrong about that.

Linux as AC 97 sound

Posted Dec 27, 2008 0:21 UTC (Sat) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

A customer's computer budget is only so big, and Intel wants a bigger share of it. If a customer buys a expensive Creative Labs card instead of using the generic Intel sound hardware on the motherboard, that's a smaller fraction of the budget going to Intel. Same for graphics, and every other part of the system -- there's a cheap generic version that customers can choose in order to spend more on the Intel processor and chipset.

Supporting Linux is just giving customers another cheap generic option.

What's in it for Intel?

Posted Dec 29, 2008 8:35 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Intel and Microsoft are in here for the money and Microsoft has shown little hesitation in the past to kill Intel projects by not supporting them in Windows when it felt they didn't align with its strategy.

OTOH AMD's x86-64 succeeded in part thanks to 64bit support by Linux server-side years before Windows was ready.

For a hardware manufacturer good Linux support is insurance its new hardware won't be killed due to lack of interest Microsoft-side.