Cool Tech Reviews

The Pentium Chronicles : The People, Passion, and Politics Behind Intel’s Landmark Chips by Robert P. Colwell. Published 2006 by John Wiley & Sons. ISBN: 0471736171.

Summary: Dr. Robert P. Colwell was Chief Architect of Intel’s wildly successful P6 processor and the The Pentium Chronicles is an anecdotal account of its development from someone who was in on it from the start. While portions of the book will only appeal to those in the chip industry, there is something there for everyone about life in a large organization.

Review: Dr. Colwell’s account of the development of the Intel’s “P6″ processor (which appeared to great success as Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, and other names) will inevitably be compared to Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, but the comparison is imprecise. While Kidder provides a start-to-finish narrative of the development of a minicomputer at Data General in the 70’s, Colwell recounts a selection of high (and low) spots along the way to the completion of the P6. Both projects were huge bets for their respective companies that were ultimately successful and both teams seemed to have suffered the same sort of “post partum depression” when they were completed.

Colwell describes starting out with a small team and the perils of each step along the way from concept to final production of a large chip technology project. The technological and development process insights are interesting to me and likely anyone else with experience in the industry. One is the guidance of design with performance information based on real data which is often amazingly absent from many technical projects. While many designers tend to shoot from the hip based on their “intuitions,” Colwell describes how his team trained their intuitions in designing the unprecedented features of the P6 using performance analysis tools they wrote themselves and exploiting real instruction traces.

If that is too techie for you, there are plenty of items of more general interest about the computer industry (e.g. a meeting at Microsoft turning into a shouting match between the Windows 95 and Windows NT teams or an off-the-cuff remark at a press event being blazoned across the headlines) and about life in a large organization. What do you do when when rival teams make bogus performance claims; or when there’s a corporate directive replacing satisfactory tool systems with buggy “approved” versions; or when implementing the latest corporate slogan campaign has your engineers in revolt? Colwell has no magic answer other than to shoot straight and tell the truth which is the best advice anyone can give.

However, while it never seems like it at the time, all successful technical projects are a brief magic moment which passes all too swiftly. Organizations inevitably change which places a premium on another key skill which is knowing when to move on. Colwell eventually did exactly that and explains why. The changes that have taken place at Intel over the years are likely one of the reasons it is facing its current difficulties.

John Hazard and John G. Spooner at eWeek:

NEW YORK - Intel Corp. is touting its next mobile platform, dubbed Napa, as another major milestone in notebook PC history.

At a session for reporters and business analysts here Tuesday, Erik Reid, product marketing director at Intel’s Mobile Platforms Group, stood Yonah—the chip maker’s first dual-core mobile Pentium processor—and Napa next to such advances as flat-panel displays and the chip maker’s first Centrino chip bundle, which helped to jump-start the trend of pairing notebooks and wireless.

Intel claims the latest notebook technology stands to boost average performance 68 percent beyond that of its current Sonoma platform, which includes its single-core Pentium M, while reducing power consumption an average of 28 percent, extending battery life beyond the 5-hour mark, Reid said. Napa also improves wireless bandwidth and can help cut the size of a notebook by 30 percent versus today’s machines, the Santa Clara, Calif., company said.

But the question left unanswered was whether the Napa chipset would be the basis for the new Apple laptops:

Intel announced Tuesday that its new line of chips will be built into more than 230 new laptop computers coming in 2006, making them much better at running music, movies and other digital media.

But it wouldn’t say a word about whether that includes the laptop creating the most buzz, expected from its new marquee customer, Apple Computer.

The new laptops are based on Intel’s new Napa platform that will enable the biggest upgrade in two years for portable technology. An Apple laptop with the technology could address the pent-up demand among the Macintosh faithful who have been disappointed with Apple laptops that run on Power PC chips. Apple said this year it would switch to Intel by mid-2006.
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A number of analysts expect Apple to introduce its first Intel-based laptop with the new Napa technology at its Macworld trade show in January.

Why wouldn’t Apple use it? I can think of a few reasons, mostly in the vein of Apple wanting to clearly distinguish their hardware from the general WinTel market, but presumably they could sufficiently personalize the Napa platform so that wouldn’t be a problem.

Sumner Lemon at InfoWorld:

Shenzhen Chuanghui Electronics Co. isn’t shy about offering re-marked Intel processors for sale: the company is openly selling them through a major Chinese Web site and brags that its re-marked Pentium 4 chips look just like the real thing.

Re-marking is a process whereby a processor is relabeled to look like a chip that offers better performance and has a greater value.
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The Chuanghui storefronts describe the re-marked chips as Celeron processors that have been altered to pass as 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processors and assure prospective customers that they look just like the real thing.
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The re-marked processors that Chuanghui sells are actually 1.7GHz Celeron chips and are currently available for $78 each, including a motherboard, in quantities of 100 or more, said James Zhan, a company representative named online as a contact for potential buyers.

By comparison, Intel sells the real thing for $401 in 1,000-unit quantities, without a motherboard, according to its most recent price list.
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Chuanghui handles the re-marking of the Celeron chips itself, Zhan said. In addition, the company provides buyers with software that masks the identify of the re-marked Celerons from a computer’s BIOS and Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system, fooling the software into believing the chip is actually a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processor, he said.

Chuanghui began offering re-marked chips one year ago and now sells around 1,000 of them every month, primarily to buyers in Asia and Africa, Zhan said.
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Zhan defended Chuanghui’s sale of re-marked chips, saying the company makes no attempt to hide what had been done to the chips or to pass them off as a more valuable processor. “I tell them the truth,” he said.

However, Zhan said Chuanghui has no control over how its customers represent the re-marked chips when they resell them.

Really classy.