Intel Announces New Developer Zone To Showcase Their Wide Array Of Software

Along with announcing Alder Lake and other hardware advancements, Intel is using their new Innovation event kicking off today to also talk more about their vast collection of software... This follows Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger's comments from earlier in the week around a bias towards open-source and a pledge to openness. As part of this, Intel is today announcing a new and unified Developer Zone.

For increasing the exposure to their toolkits, reference designs, and other software and assets across AI / client / cloud / 5G / gaming, the new Intel Developer Zone intends to be their spot to showcase it all. This will cover not only their CPU-focused software offerings but also GPUs, FPGAs, and more. This new Developer Zone will be found at developer.intel.com. Meanwhile the company also shared they still plan to maintain open.intel.com for showcasing specifically their open-source software wares.

We'll see how the new Intel Developer Zone plays out. It's not the first time Intel has tried to provide a collected view of their software offerings, especially on the open-source side. There is the now rather defunct 01.org that previously was used to showcase their open-source software projects, but that's been mostly dormant since the restructuring at the company and the quiet changes at what was the Intel Open-Source Technology Center.

Even when it comes to Intel's open-source Git repositories right now for development, some are under github.com/intel while there are also other organizations like Intel's github.com/oneapi-src or projects like the SVT encoders being under their github.com/OpenVisualCloud. There are also some Intel open-source projects like IWD and ConnMan not even hosted on GitHub but just Kernel.org. So even finding and browsing through all of the different open-source projects maintained by Intel can be currently difficult. Needless to say, the announcements for where they are relaying information from the different open-source projects has tended to be equally fragmented. I could ramble on longer, but rather busy preparing for Alder Lake Linux testing... Long story short, hopefully the new Intel Developer Zone will prove useful and hopefully unify more of their diverse software offerings.

At the Intel Innovation event, the company will also be talking up their contributions to the likes of the Linux kernel, KVM virtualization, the LLVM compiler stack, contributions to Chromium, the ACRN hypervisor, ControlFlag, Intel Quantum simulator, and the Web Assembly Micro Runtime, among others. They contribute to more than "100 different open source projects" according to their summary provided in advance of today's announcements.

In prior years at their Open-Source Technology Summit and other events they have cited numbers from 10k~13k engineers contributing to open-source and involved with their software efforts. The latest number they are reporting puts that at over 15k software engineers.

I should be having some more information to share shortly on Intel's software efforts from Intel's new CTO Greg Lavender who is also serving as their GM of the Software and Advanced Technology Group. During a chat last week, he made similar comments to Gelsinger's recent blog post with much praise around open-source software. His name might ring a bell with some of you since during the Sun Microsystems days he served as VP of Engineering for Solaris.