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Different strokes for different folks. What do we mean by that? While Gabe Newell and the rest of the gang at Valve can't get enough Linux in their diet, the financial weight watchers at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) just got through liposuctioning a portion of its Linux kernel development team by closing its Dresden, Germany-based Operating System Research Center (OSRC).
The move is part of AMD's overall restructuring plan that includes laying off 15 percent of its workforce. OSRC was home to around two dozen employees who were mainly tasked with developing Linux support for AMD's server chips, though they also constructed code and extensions for desktop and notebook CPUs. Some also worked on open source virtualization solutions such as the Xen hypervisor, H-Online reports.
"The OSRC is acting as a bridge between the OS development community and the worldwide AMD processor design community and plays an increasing role in ensuring next-generation AMD products and solutions enable the most advanced OS and application features," AMD states on its OSRC portal. "We are specialized in OS virtualization, memory management, multi-core scheduling, and performance measuring to make better use of future multi-core architectures."
AMD last month warned investors that its third-quarter revenue would likely dip 10 percent from the previous quarter due to sluggish demand and a consumer preference towards tablet PCs. Wall Street reacted negatively to the news, sending shares of AMD stock down to $2,86, the lowest it had been in three years at that point. AMD stock is currently trading at around $2.
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Comments are closed on this article
d3v
November 10, 2012 at 10:54pm
How exactly is AMD planning on selling server chips without having support for Linux? Linux is HUGE in the server world.
DarkMatter
November 09, 2012 at 4:45pm
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIyNDk
Not that I would ever do a cross post... But there is more to the story ..
Happy Friday...
Andrew.Hodge
November 09, 2012 at 12:20pm
I really don't think this will hurt the linux community all that much, anyways, although support for linux on AMD (sadly, my rig) might get worse.
praetor_alpha
November 09, 2012 at 10:13am
If I had to choose only one, I would rather have better AMD CPUs than better AMD Linux support.
vrmlbasic
November 09, 2012 at 12:39pm
I thought that AMD CPUs were running markedly better under Linux, due to AMD's support of Linux, as the process scheduler on Linux didn't have its head buried in the sand regarding the Bulldozer "module" structure??
