NEW LINUX OS TO BE RELEASED IN FALL

August 25, 2000

FEATURES & COMMENTARY

San Diego, CA — A major new release of the Linux operating system will be available in the fall, and will offer significant performance improvements over the current version, according to Linus Torvalds, overseer of the Linux movement.

But Mr. Torvalds also said that, for all its recent advances, it will be many years before Linux appeals to the masses in the same way that Microsoft Corp.’s Windows or Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh software do. Indeed, he said neither his parents nor his sister use Linux, but prefer Windows-based or Macintosh computers.

The normally inaccessible Mr. Torvalds spoke in an interview at a Linux trade show in San Jose, Calif. As a student in his native Finland a decade earlier, he created the basic components of the Linux operating system, then put it on the Internet to let others make improvements to it.

Today, Mr. Torvalds, 30 years old, works for a Silicon Valley semiconductor firm, though he spends much of his time coordinating the global network of volunteer Linux programmers.

Meanwhile, his creation has become so popular with programmers that it represents one of the most serious competitive threats to Microsoft’s influence on the software industry.

The new version of Linux, the first in a year and a half, will be available in two or three months, Mr. Torvalds said, many months later than he had initially planned on releasing it.

He said the new version of Linux will run better on high-end computers, such as those containing more than one processor. Mr. Torvalds said tests show the new Linux compares “really well” with its rivals, including Windows and other versions of Unix. “It is painful for me to go back and use the 2.2 kernel,” he said, referring to the current version.

Mr. Torvalds said, though, that outside of Linux’s home base of technically minded computer users, Windows still has a formidable advantage over Linux: There are simply far more programs that run on Windows.

“Windows is still a no-brainer for most people,” he said, adding it will take Linux “perhaps five or 10 years” to catch up, at least for home-computer users. But he said average business users might move to Linux sooner, perhaps by next year.

Mr. Torvalds described last year as a watershed for Linux, because of the growing interest in the software from big companies such as International Business Machines Corp., as well as because of the successful public offerings of Linux-only companies such as Red Hat Inc.

What’s more, Microsoft last year began to take notice of Linux. In the spring, for example, it released a study showing that Windows NT outperformed Linux in some common computing tasks.

The study caused an uproar in the Linux camp, with Mr. Torvalds and others suggesting at the time that they had somehow been rigged. Subsequent tests, though, showed Microsoft was right, and in his interview, Mr. Torvalds conceded that he initially had been “in denial” on the matter.

“We had been arrogant,” he said, adding it was painful for him to admit that Windows was better than Linux, at least in the areas covered by the Microsoft test.

But he said the episode ended up being “very motivational to us,” since it forced Linux developers to go back and fix the bottlenecks that caused Linux to lose to Windows in the first place.

The Linux movement has made the founders of some Linux concerns vastly wealthy, even while the stock of Linux companies has fallen sharply from their initial highs.

Mr. Torvalds has benefited from that boom by virtue of having received “friends and family” stock in a number of Linux firms. As a result, he said he is a millionaire now – hardly an epic accomplishment in Silicon Valley these days – though just barely. He said he also is availing himself of some of the advantages of good fortune, such as buying a house for himself, his wife and two young daughters, as well as trading in his old Pontiac for a sporty BMW Z3. His fortunes may swell in coming months, as his employer, Transmeta Corp., filed to go public.

Mr. Torvalds coordinates Linux in a somewhat detached manner. He concerns himself only with intricate, technical details of Linux, and won’t take a stand on such issues as what sort of user interface the software should have.

That is one reason there are two rival Linux interfaces. Mr. Torvalds also has no support staff; in fact, he doesn’t even have a secretary.

Mr. Torvalds defended his habits. He said, for example, that not selecting an “official” Linux user interface allows the best one to emerge through competition. He also said that, by not having a staff, he can ignore the sorts of routine administrative details that would bog him down.

He said he believes many matters are better handled by specialized Linux companies like Red Hat.

On other matters, Mr. Torvalds said some action should be taken against Microsoft in the current antitrust case, but added he is against the Justice Department’s proposed division of Microsoft into an operating-system concern and an applications company.

He said more competition would be created by spliting Microsoft into two or three “Baby Bills,” each of which would sell the same products.

He also said the increasing commercialization of Linux doesn’t concern him, since “I don’t worry anymore about people being able to control Linux with money.” He also said big corporations such as IBM are now as much a part of the “Linux community” as the archetypal Linux hacker, and that they should make the Linux-related moves they want to without being unduly concerned about what he or others might think of them. “Linux is much less homogeneous now than it was a few years ago,” he said.

============================================================

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire