Chipmakers Lean on Open Source (Again)
Recent reports from our freshly-deputized chip correspondent Agam Shah show that microprocessor manufacturers are truly taking the open source software community seriously. With the easy returns of Moore’s Law coming to an end, the chip giants are looking to better serve the software development community. Participating in the open source community is a good first step.
“I’m attracting some of the best talent in the industry. They’re leaving the big players, coming to Intel because of … what [CEO Pat Gelsinger] and I are driving with our software-first commitment. Our open source commitment is back” — Greg Lavender, chief technology officer at Intel told Shah at Intel’s Vision trade show last week.
Indeed they are bringing some heavy hitters into the shop. The chipmaker last month hired Arun Gupta, who formerly was at Apple, to be vice president and general manager for open ecosystem. Shortly after, the company tapped Brendan Gregg, formerly from Netflix and an expert on Linux performance tools, to be an Intel fellow.
Lavender said Intel will soon resuscitate its public engagement and dialog with the open source community, an effort that waned in recent years, the company has admitted.
Intel rival AMD is also getting its software strategy in order, and plans to lean heavily into open source as well, Shah reported the previous week.
“We do believe in open source. We think collaboration is an important part of the ecosystem as well. All of those are things that we are working on to provide more complete solutions for our customers,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said in an earnings call. The company is currently building what it calls a comprehensive software portfolio for developers.
Perhaps the biggest news of all, however, is of GPU maker Nvidia open sourcing its GPU Linux kernel modules. For years, the Linux community howled for these modules to be open source, which the company had steadfastly refused to do. With the source code now exposed, coders will be able to write applications that will run more efficiently on the company’s GPUs. It’ll also allow Linux purveyors, such as Canonical and SUSE, to package kernel drivers directly into their distributions.
Nvidia last month hired open source advocate Guy Martin to be director of open source and standards, and to lead the company’s open source efforts.
We look forward to Shah’s additional reporting from the frontlines of chip manufacturing, and the benefits it will offer for the cloud native community.
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