Intel has cancelled the Thunder Bay SoC project and is removing the relevant Linux driver code

CTOnews.com March 18 news, according to foreign science and technology media Phoronix reported that Intel quietly cancelled Thunder Bay SoC. The SoC integrates the general CPU kernel and Movidius hardware for computer vision.

Intel has not yet disclosed the specific reasons for canceling the SoC. For now, Intel still wants to separate the CPU from the visual processing unit (VPU).

Thunder Bay SoC is a low-power design that includes Arm Cortex-A53 CPU core and Movidius VPU hardware, but the exact configuration is not yet clear. The SoC is mainly used for commercial and Internet of things applications that require computer vision acceleration and general processing power.

Linux Kernel began to support Thunder Bay;-related features in the 2021 mainline code and continue to upstream in 2022.

Intel released a set of patches yesterday to start removing Thunder Bay code from the Linux kernel. This removal starts with the eMMC patch and then extends to other content.

CTOnews.com translated the patch as follows: "remove the Thunder Bay-related code because the product has been cancelled and there are no end customers or users."