Re:Intel axes Nervana just two months after launch
by fallous on Wednesday February 05, 2020 @02:39PM
(#22250285)
It's not that the products are poor but that Intel has a long and proud tradition of killing any product that is not directly related to x86.
Intel GPU started with i740 (a stand-alone AGP card), which is the last stand-alone GPU they made... and that was 1998 or so.
Their networking chipsets were a result of Intel's own x86 motherboard business, especially in the server arena. Intel also bought out companies in the late 90s/early 2000s to build their stand-alone network appliance business (routers, firewalls, SSL accelerators, etc) only to prompt kill that off when x86 started stumbling thanks to the P4 and AMD's competition.
(Someone else already mentioned SSD.)
* Intel GPU. Work quite well on Linux for the past 10 years (albeit not ace 3D performance due to hardware limitations)
* Intel WLAN. Work great on Linux. They even worked in a time where almost no other FOSS drivers for WLAN were around.
* Intel LAN. Work great on Linux. Great performance.
I'm not at all a fan of Intel. Their x86-64 CPUs are overpriced compared to AMD's Ryzen and Threadripper. But the above three? I would not run away from these; on the contrary.