The Pentium Chronicles
The People, Passion, and Politics behind Intel's Landmark Chips
by Robert P. Colwell
John Wiley & Sons, 2006.
Bob Colwell was the lead architect of the Intel P6 project, which became the Pentium Pro processor. The marketing name suggests that the P6 was only a small evolutionary improvement to the original Pentium, but the engineering reality is far different. The original Pentium (P5) was designed at Intel’s original facilities in California, by many of the same engineers that had worked on the 80486 and 80386. The P6, by contrast, was designed by a brand new team in Oregon, charged with securing Intel’s dominance of the microprocessor world by bringing the full range of RISC techniques to the x86 platform. The first engineer to join that team was Bob Colwell.
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He also relishes several “I told you so” moments over Intel’s stumbles. For example, he was called a “Chicken Little” for pointing out that Intel owes a great deal of its success to missteps by competitors. They shouldn’t pat themselves on the back too much, for at some point, continued speed would no longer be enough to keep Intel on top. He saw the end of the megahertz race in 1998 – about five years before it actually came to be. He also saw Itanium as a hopelessly complicated combination of unprecedented architectural changes, and thought that it should instead have been a proof-of-concept research project.
