Intel To Further Collaborate With Red Hat, Canonical & SUSE For Intel-Optimized Linux Distros

Intel announced this morning on the second day of their Innovation 2023 conference that they are collaborating with software vendors such as Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE for providing Intel-optimized Linux distributions.

At Intel Innovation 2023 they are talking up the new UXL Foundation that is an evolution of their oneAPI initiative and as well another interesting bit of news to Phoronix readers today is they are promoting their "optimized performance" push in the Linux world. Intel is engaging Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE to:

"provide Intel-optimized distributions of their enterprise software releases to help ensure optimized performance for the latest Intel architectures."

It's not an entirely new endeavor. In the past I've written multiple times about Canonical and Intel collaborating on Ubuntu optimized for select Intel CPUs with different optimized images. Today's Innovation 2023 announcement appears to be an extension of that effort.

Intel and Red Hat at Innovation 2023 did announce an "expanded collaboration" with Intel contributing to upstream RHEL by way of CentOS Stream. Intel will also continue contributing performance optimizations to various tools and frameworks, especially in the AI space such as with PyTorch and TensorFlow.

It will be interesting to see what new fruits of these collaborations come. Intel continues to maintain their Intel-optimized Clear Linux platform with some really aggressive performance optimizations but there hasn't been too much news there recently. These enterprise Linux distributions (at least Red Hat and SUSE) have talked of raising their x86_64 baseline requirements for their next major releases, exploring HWCAPs for optimized libraries selected at run-time based on the CPU(s) in use, and similar optimizations. We certainly welcome any other optimizations for performance and power efficiency pursued by Intel and these vendors. With typically sticking to standards/specifications, many of these efforts can also pay off for those running AMD processors on Linux too.

I'll certainly be reporting more on the results of the increased collaborations on Phoronix as new optimizations are introduced -- and of course, the benchmarking. Kudos to Intel as always for their immense open-source/Linux software ecosystem contributions across multiple levels and countless different open-source projects.