Intel Sued Over Historic DEC Chip Site's Future (theregister.com) 43
Intel is being taken to court in Massachusetts over its proposals to build a distribution and logistics warehouse on the site of its defunct R&D offices and chip factory that closed in 2013. The Register reports: At the heart of this showdown are claims by townsfolk that Intel has not revealed to the surrounding community what exactly it intends to build, and that the land is supposed to be used for industry and manufacturing yet it appears a huge commercial warehouse will be built instead. The x86 giant has spent years trying to figure out what to do the campus -- whether to salvage it for production or research, or to sell it to a developer. It came close to securing a buyer earlier this year.
The site in question is at 75 Reed Road in Hudson, Massachusetts, which holds a special place in computer history. It was the home of Digital Equipment Corporation's R&D and chip manufacturing before Intel took over the land and facility following a patent battle with DEC in 1997. Intel continued R&D at the site and kept it producing chips until it threw the towel in, leaving the location open to options. Ultimately, the site was up for sale with Intel planning to demolish the 40-year-old main buildings while offloading the land. However, the chipmaker, perhaps in response to a revitalization of American semiconductor manufacturing funded by CHIPS Act government subsidies, decided it wants to remake the property into a distribution and logistics and storage facility -- something that might sound innocuous but has the nearby community up in arms.
Further, Intel doesn't have to use the redeveloped site for its own purposes at all: it can, and probably will, market the facility to a future tenant. And it can breeze through planning law requirements without having to reveal the full scope of traffic, pollution, and other impacts due to its status as a "logistics" facility. And that is what really has the locals enraged. Crucially, the site is adjacent to two retirement villages with 286 units and a childcare center. As a former R&D and manufacturing facility, neighboring communities understood the scope of traffic and resource impacts of such a factory. [...] The even bigger problem is that this represents another example of a large tech company wheedling its way through local restrictions to build community-damning facilities, said Michael Pill, the lawyer representing both retirement condo facilities and the childcare center in their legal challenge [PDF] to Intel. "What Intel has done here is something deeply unpleasant that grows out of its desire to dump the property without any thought to the community where they were once an important pillar of manufacturing," Pill told The Register. "There is a pattern of development in which big companies come sailing into towns, saying they'll build million-plus square foot facilities with hundreds of loading docks and all the planning is done on spec."
In response to the lawsuit, Intel's lawyers said in a filing that the proposed changes are subject to approval by the town: "Because the proposed redevelopment is a permitted use in the zoning district, the project will require site plan review from the town of Hudson planning board."
The site in question is at 75 Reed Road in Hudson, Massachusetts, which holds a special place in computer history. It was the home of Digital Equipment Corporation's R&D and chip manufacturing before Intel took over the land and facility following a patent battle with DEC in 1997. Intel continued R&D at the site and kept it producing chips until it threw the towel in, leaving the location open to options. Ultimately, the site was up for sale with Intel planning to demolish the 40-year-old main buildings while offloading the land. However, the chipmaker, perhaps in response to a revitalization of American semiconductor manufacturing funded by CHIPS Act government subsidies, decided it wants to remake the property into a distribution and logistics and storage facility -- something that might sound innocuous but has the nearby community up in arms.
Further, Intel doesn't have to use the redeveloped site for its own purposes at all: it can, and probably will, market the facility to a future tenant. And it can breeze through planning law requirements without having to reveal the full scope of traffic, pollution, and other impacts due to its status as a "logistics" facility. And that is what really has the locals enraged. Crucially, the site is adjacent to two retirement villages with 286 units and a childcare center. As a former R&D and manufacturing facility, neighboring communities understood the scope of traffic and resource impacts of such a factory. [...] The even bigger problem is that this represents another example of a large tech company wheedling its way through local restrictions to build community-damning facilities, said Michael Pill, the lawyer representing both retirement condo facilities and the childcare center in their legal challenge [PDF] to Intel. "What Intel has done here is something deeply unpleasant that grows out of its desire to dump the property without any thought to the community where they were once an important pillar of manufacturing," Pill told The Register. "There is a pattern of development in which big companies come sailing into towns, saying they'll build million-plus square foot facilities with hundreds of loading docks and all the planning is done on spec."
In response to the lawsuit, Intel's lawyers said in a filing that the proposed changes are subject to approval by the town: "Because the proposed redevelopment is a permitted use in the zoning district, the project will require site plan review from the town of Hudson planning board."
It's their property (Score:5, Insightful)
What is it, with NIMBYs? Intel owns the property, and intends to use it for its zoned purpose. Logistics: guess what, that may involve a lot of heavy trucks. The fact that - while the property was not in use - someone decided to build a retirement home next to it? That was entirely their decision. Now they get to live with the consequences.
This strike a bit close to home, if on a smaller scale. We bought a piece of land next to an apartment building. Our land is "downhill", which is on the side of the apartments that have a view down the valley. No surprise: our house interferes with the view. Some apartment owners are upset: "Just like that" we built a house? Um...yes? If you didn't want anyone to build there, you should have bought the land yourself. The fact that it sat empty for decades was never a guarantee that it would *stay* empty.
Re:It's their property (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel hasn't decided what exactly to do with it yet, and that's their business. The arguments being made against them are plainly absurd, as if a site that hasn't employed anyone in nine years is a pillar of the manufacturing industry, or that neighbors will be terribly put out by having trucks go past for one purpose but not another.
Re: (Score:3)
We the people ultimately own the land.
No, you don't. Private property in general is owned by whoever owns the title (guess, who, Intel.)
You just don't hand wave "we teh peepuul" like a magic incantation that does away with the fundamental concept of ownership of private property.
Re: (Score:1)
People are allowed to be upset at your house or anything else.
Did they -do- anything to stop your house construction? You don't say so I'm going to assume no. So who cares if they were "upset"?
A lot of people get upset everyday about a lot of things. They -do- nothing.
Re: (Score:3)
The article seems to imply that the land isn't specifically zoned for logistics and that Intel isn't (and doesn't have to be) transparent about who will actually use the land or how it will be used. There's no way for anyone to effectively plan for the new facility.
Re: It's their property (Score:4, Insightful)
the land isn't specifically zoned for logistics
If that is even a distinct zoning category there. In my town, that would be included in the "commercial/light industrial" definition. Trucks drive in, drop stuff off and later take stuff away. What goes on inside the building isn't an issue (logistics being much less obnoxious than some actual manufacturing).
Re: (Score:2)
Unknown. That detail is not provided. One gets the impression that the old DEC facility didn't produce that much heavy traffic, so it likely co-existed fairly well with the nearby residential area.
Re: (Score:3)
There's no way for anyone to effectively plan for the new facility.
That might make sense if the city was suing Intel.
But the lawsuit is from a bunch of random private entities, including a daycare center and a retirement community.
Intel is handling the process poorly. The proper way to handle a project like this is to propose something totally unacceptable, like a plutonium reprocessing facility. Let the NIMBYs and BANANAs exhaust themselves fighting that, and then offer the warehouse that you really want as a reasonable alternative.
Re: (Score:2)
"Because the proposed redevelopment is a permitted use in the zoning district, the project will require site plan review from the town of Hudson planning board." They have to get a permit to change the use from manufacturing to logistics, at least according to Intel.
Re: (Score:3)
Um...yes? If you didn't want anyone to build there, you should have bought the land yourself. The fact that it sat empty for decades was never a guarantee that it would *stay* empty...
You don't necessarily have to own the land, though: There's something called a servitude of view or view easement.. that can be established in different ways.
One of those ways is for the Apartment owners to file a lawsuit in court on some basis, and ask for the Judge to create that easement.
The apartment owners can also see
Re: (Score:2)
Fine. I'll buy land and build a trash incinerator upwind and less than a mile from where you live.
The land is clearly listed as mixed zoning... and the public *does* have rights.
Re: (Score:3)
DEC Alpha, great chip for its day (Score:1)
I had a dec alpha workstation under my desk and several in the server room including a fully loaded 8400. What a joy to work on.
Too bad DEC sales wasn't as good as DEC engineering. Intel was stupid to waste money on DEC. Didn't make much use of their tech and wasn't competitive.
Re: (Score:3)
Cheap but also legacy (and perf) (Score:3)
and everyone went for the cheap clone of what they were doing (amd64) instead of Intel's version of the future with the Itanium instruction set.
Cheap is only partially the reason why people went with AMD's instead of Intel's 64bits offering.
The other is a combination of tons of legacy and closed-source proprietary world.
See, while the academics where pretty much happy with Itanium (partially because in research, specially on computing clusters, Linux is the absolute king, and Linux on Itanium is almost "just a re-compile of the source code" away. And also partially because its weird VLIW architecture is usefuly for some number crunching workloads),
Re: (Score:2)
Itanium only makes sense if you think of it as an overgrown DSP. Various DSPs have had explicit parallelism going back as far as the DSP16 at least. It performed very well with hand-optimised code, but compilers were never good at getting maximum throughput from it. The irony was that with the lack of instruction stream reordering and rename registers, Intel was saying that we'd all be moving to JIT-compiled code that would be optimised for the specific microarchitecture of your particular CPU. Given ho
Re: (Score:2)
Their use was pretty half-assed. I watched it happen as a DEC guy. Sad day they officially announced the Alpha was dead. Iirc they sold it off to some Asian company for a song and lollipop and it was never seen again.
DEC had this cool emulation/binary translation tech called FX!32 which I got to play with. On first run of an unknown application it ran x86 on Alpha in pure software emulation mode but it also translated the x86 codes into Alpha and wrote them to disk for future runs. The more you used an
Re: (Score:2)
That approach sounds very similar to Rosetta 2 by the way, any link you're aware of? Rosetta 1 I believe (but am prepared to be wrong) translated each time, whereas Rosetta 2 is essentially an x86->ARM JIT that stores the results.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm not familiar with R2 but your description of it is exactly how FX!32 worked. (Yet another DEC sales/marketing failure with a name like that... sigh).
There's still a ton of info on it, just search for DEC fx!32 and follow along to whichever details you're looking for. It was pretty well documented iirc.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? I remember DEC Alpha workstations being prone to frequent failures. You were lucky if half of them were working on any given day. Everyone was happy when they were replaced with Sun UltraSPARC workstations that had better performance, too.
Re: (Score:1)
Shrug, dunno, ours were rock solid. Maybe we were lucky. Maybe you were unlucky. I have no idea. My personal experience with them was they were rock solid.
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Really? I remember DEC Alpha workstations being prone to frequent failures.
Sadly I was never involved with any. What specifically were the problems?
Re: (Score:2)
They were used as CAD workstations. They always ran hot with all the issues that entails. Lots of component failures - power supplies, cooling fans, voltage regulators, even mainboards. They seemed to be inadequately built for the heat output and power requirements.
Re: (Score:2)
Clock for clock alpha (ev6/ev7) trounced netburst, especially on floating point... High clocks at the cost of everything else is not what alpha was about, although the earlier alphas did tend to be higher clocked than anything else available at the time anyway.
Re: (Score:1)
Can we start with those kids who threw soup on Van Gogh's Sunflowers? I'd pay to see that.
this smells familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
Reminds me a bit of stories of city folk moving out into a property in the country and then lodging complaints about the smell when it's time for the farmers to be fertilizing the fields.
They put themselves in that situation (without thinking ahead, or using common sense), they're unhappy with the results, and now want to force someone else to make a change to make them happy.
Unless there's some actual tangible law being violated, or a breaking of some sort of contract or commitment, they need to be told to go pound sand. It's not the job of the courts to enforce someone's "I don't like it!"
Re: (Score:3)
Unless there's some actual tangible law being violated, or a breaking of some sort of contract or commitment, they need to be told to go pound sand. It's not the job of the courts to enforce someone's "I don't like it!"
Courts (above small claims anyway where they usually don't do much of any prior review of cases before the parties appear) usually toss cases with prejudice when the suits boil down "I don't like it". I don't know what stage this suit against Intel is at and I generally believe owners should have pretty iron-clad rights-to-enjoy-their-property. That does not however mean they existing laws we have around zoning, land-use, and covenants (which can require all kinds of strange things) that may be attached dee
Claim (Score:3)
I'm guessing the court will toss the case based on there being no actionable claim. I don't think anyone can quantify the damages created to the citizens by Intel building a warehouse instead of a factory or something. The court can't rezone a property, that's the job of a zoning commission. So there isn't really anything the court can do to fix any problems the citizens might have.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm guessing the court will toss the case based on there being no actionable claim.
Well this is one of the first phases of any lawsuit.. I imagine Intel's probably already gottten or will soon get out Motion to dismiss for failure to state a proper claim.
Better Chips (Score:4, Funny)
You would think that the retirees and kids would want better CPUs than 286s...
Re:Better Chips (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Better Chips (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm still trying to figure out why retirees need a childcare center.
Kids are taking longer and longer to move out of the house. Once the retirees no longer have a basement, they want somewhere to get them out of the way. This is incidentally what makes this "News That Matters", as it may impact Slashdot regulars.
The one time (Score:2)
The old DIGITAL logo applies and slashdot doesn't use it!
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, came here to state that exact thing.
Traffic concerns seem valid (Score:2)
Re: Traffic concerns seem valid (Score:2)
It's already zoned industrial/manufacturing. Stuff comes and goes by truck as part of that function.
Re: (Score:1)
The 55+ condos community just south of the site was built in 2005. The neighborhood just north of it was built in 2008. If the site has been idle for 9 years, it was in use when they were both built, and there was some level of traffic associated with it, which has now been gone for 9 years. And folks have presumably gotten comfortable with that low level of traffic over the last 9 years. If Intel put the site back into use in the same function it held before, I bet they'd scream and moan about all the
DEC Truly needs to be a monument (Score:2)
A monument to stupidity.
My University was the second largest DEC site in the country and I have never been slapped in the face by a more arrogant less customer centric company.
The company spent more time and effort figuring out ways to cripple it's products than making it work. Be it the PC-350 Floppy disks that had to be bought pre formatted at 10 times the cost, to having PCs based on the PDP11 architecture that wouldn't run RSX-11M.
I'll never forget when Ken Olsen came to give a talk and took questions f
Has anyone actually been to Hudson? (Score:2)
...where they were once an important pillar of manufacturing," Pill told The Register. "There is a pattern of development in which big companies come sailing into towns, saying they'll build million-plus square foot facilities with hundreds of loading docks...
Did anyone involved in this article actually visit Hudson? I grew up two towns over. There's no manufacturing to speak of for for miles around. Yes, New England used to be a manufacturing hub. In the water-powered 19th century. This part of the Commonwealth hasn't had manufacturing to speak of for at least 75 years.
Not to mention that a logistics facility probably needs more people than a modern, automated factory does.