AMD Closes OSRC, Lays Off Several Linux Kernel Developers 94
From the H reporting on LinuxCon Europe comes news that several Linux kernel developers have been laid off by AMD as part of its workforce reduction. From the article: "OSRC staff primarily worked to develop the Linux support for AMD's server processors, but they also wrote code and extensions for related desktop and notebook CPUs – for example, they looked after the code to support CPU frequency scaling for the PowerNow and Turbo Core technologies. While working on the kernel's IOMMU and KVM support, one of AMD's former employees contributed to the development of the "IOMMU groups" feature that was integrated into Linux 3.6; this feature provides the basis for a new Linux 3.6 technology that allows a host's PCIe devices to be passed through to virtual machines and can also be used with Intel CPUs."
Looks like the group was doing interesting research on hypervisors, lockless data structures, and multi-core synchronization primitives among other things. The Open Source Radeon driver developers are not affected by this at least.
Re:Not sure I understand... (Score:4, Interesting)
The server market, usually Linux-based, appears to be AMD's most stable market. Opterons are very often preferred over Xeons for a variety of reasons.
If all you read is slashdot, yes. Actually AMD's server market share has been in big decline from 15% in 2007 to below 5% today. They're quite well represented in the TOP500 as apparently they give good quantity discounts for the PR, but mainstream companies are >95% Intel now. And with AMD now betting on ARM servers that's certainly not going to improve in the short term.
Re:I guess they don't want me to buy their product (Score:4, Interesting)
Well if you look at who is at the industrial park at the 407 and Leslie (where ATI HQ is in Markham, just outside Toronto), qualcomm seems to have setup shop, and has a conspicuously large number of job openings for graphics people...