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Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

Why does Intel spend money on doing this sort of stuff? I'm certainly happy they do, just curious as to why. I can't see how Linux generically being a bit faster helps them as a company.

Are they specifically looking at places where they have a disadvantage or a potential advantage relative to ARM etc?

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It's a basic business strategy called "commoditizing your complement". The better and faster software gets, the more people will want to use it and the more demand for CPUs will be created. Since Intel sells a good percentage of all server CPUs, that will also increase their own sales.

The article at https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ is an excellent introduction if you want to know more.

Why do they go to the lengths that they do for these particular features but then seem to completely shit the bed when it comes to power management under Linux?

Likely because the Linux server market is massively larger than the Linux desktop market where power management is a critical issue

Power management is shit these days under windows too, mainly down to OEMs failing to implement it fully in their BIOS leading to Microsoft dropping support to more advanced power stages.

This mainly happened because the idle power consumption without any power staging has improved drastically and so has the power density of batteries.

So this isn’t really on Intel also sleep and various other power states aren’t used in servers.

The primary reason is to make Intel CPU's more competitive compared to ARM. It's not all about the silicon. The compilers and OS code can affect performance in big ways.

I wonder if there are public statistics on how many intel chips, what portion of production, end up running linux. Probably quite a lot, what with all the cloud fleets?

So, yeah, ARM etc reminds them that there are alternatives. They don't need to focus on specific comparisons with ARM for it to be good business to keep Linux running as well as they can make it on Intel. Plus the marketing from being seen to do it.

It seems pretty straightforward to me. Focusing only on spending money on very specific measurable outcomes on your bottom line, while it might be all the rage these days, can be pretty self-defeating in the long-term. Big companies generally know this, and can afford it.

The reason is that they want software on their hardware to be faster and they don’t care if it makes competitors faster . They still have sales in the data center regardless.

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