Linux 6.4 Closes The Door On Intel Thunder Bay

While Intel Thunder Bay sparked rumors years ago as potentially being a mix of Intel x86 cores and Movidius VPU cores, although the Linux patches put it as ARM cores paired with the Movidius VPU, Thunder Bay is no more. As I wrote back in March, Intel Linux engineers have acknowledged Thunder Bay is cancelled and there are no end-customers/users so they are going ahead and removing the Linux support.

From 2021 through the first half of 2022, Intel Linux engineers contributed various upstream driver additions for supporting this next-gen Intel Movidius product. But then all went quiet on the open-source driver front. In March was when the patches began surfacing for clearing out the Linux driver support in confirming the cancellation of the product.

With the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel, the removal of Thunder Bay support is happening. The MMC pull last week went ahead and removed its Thunder Bay SoC specific code. Merged this week was also the PHY updates and again a clearing out of that Thunder Bay driver code.

With Thunder Bay having not officially shipped, Intel is dropping this code rather than uselessly maintaining it or allowing it to just be extra baggage being needlessly carried in the kernel. Farewell, Thunder Bay.