The Pentium chronicles
Subtitle: the people, passion, and politics behind Intel's landmark chips
By: Robert P. Colwell.
Publisher: Wiley; John Wiley [distributor]
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Hoboken, N.J; Chichester
Language: eng
Number of pages: 187
ISBN-13: 9780471736172
Subjects: Intel Corporation; Intel microprocessors -- Design and construction
Description: "As chief architect of the P6, Robert Colwell offers a unique perspective as he unfolds the saga of a project that ballooned from a few architects to hundreds of engineers, many just out of school. Far more than a treatise on project management, The Pentium Chronicles gives the rationale, the personal triumphs, and the humor that characterized the P6 project, on undertaking that broke all technical boundaries by being the first to try an out-of-order, speculative superscalar architecture in a microprocessor." "In down-to-earth language, organized around a framework "we wish we had known about then," Chronicles describes the architecture and key decisions that shaped the P6, Intel's most successful chip to date. Colwell's inimitable style will have readers laughing out loud at the project team's creative solutions to well-known problems. From architectural planning in a storage room jimmied open with a credit card, to a marketing presentation using shopping carts, he takes readers through events from the projects's beginning through its production. As Colwell himself recognizes, success is all about learning from others, and Chronicles is filled with stories of ordinary and exceptional people and frank assessments of "oops" moments, like the infamous FDIV bug." "As its subtitle implies, the book looks beyond RTL models and transistors to the Intel culture, often poking fun at corporate policies, like team-building exercises in which engineers ruthlessly shoot down each other's plans. Whatever your level of computing expertise, Chronicles will delight and inform you, leaving you with a better understanding of what it takes to create and grow a winning product."--BOOK JACKET
Notes: Published in association with the IEEE Computer Society.

"A Wiley-Interscience publication."

Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-172) and index.
Table of contents: title: Foreword; title: Preface; title: 1. Introduction; title: P6 project context; title: Betting on CISC; title: Proliferation thinking; title: The gauntlet; title: Developing big ideas; title: Defining success and failure; title: Senior wisdom; title: Four project phases; title: The business of excellence; title: 2. The concept phase; title: Of immediate concern; title: Success factors; title: Clear goals; title: The right people; title: P6 senior leadership; title: Setting the leadership tone; title: Managing mechanics; title: Physical context matters; title: The storage room solution; title: Beyond the whiteboard; title: "Kooshing" the talkers; title: A data-driven culture; title: The right tool; title: The "what would happen if" game; title: DFA frontiers; title: Performance; title: Benchmark selections; title: Avoiding myopic do-loops; title: Floating-point chickens and eggs; title: Legacy code performance; title: Intelligent projections; title: All design teams are not equal; title: Overpromise or overdeliver?; title: Customer visits; title: Loose lips; title: Memorable moments; title: Microsoft; title: Novell; title: Compaq; title: Insights from input; title: Not-so-secret instructions; title: Help from the software world; title: The truth about hardware and software. Establishing the design team; title: Roles and responsibilities; title: Presilicon validation; title: Wizard problem solving; title: Making microcode a special case; title: Cubicle floorplanning; title: Architects, engineers, and schedules; title: Coding, egos, subterfuge; title: 3. The refinement phase; title: Of immediate concern; title: Success factors; title: Handling the nonquantifiable; title: Managing new perspectives; title: Planning for complexity; title: Behavioral models; title: Managing a changing POR; title: The wrong way to plan; title: Engineering change orders; title: The origin of change; title: When, where, who; title: Communicating change; title: Timely resolution, no pocket vetoes; title: The ECO czar; title: ECO control and the project POR; title: The bridge from architecture to design; title: Focus groups; title: Product quality; title: Mismanaging design errors; title: Make and example of the offender; title: Hire only geniuses; title: Flog validation; title: Avoid/find/survive; title: Design to avoid bugs; title: When bugs get in anyway, find them before production; title: Identifying bugs; title: Tracking bug; title: Managing validation; title: Plan to survive bugs that make it to production; title: A six-step plan for high product quality; title: The design review; title: How not to do a review; title: When to do review; title: Another one rides the bus. 4. The realization phase; title: Of immediate concern; title: Success factors; title: Balanced decision making; title: Documentation and communication; title: Capturing unit decisions; title: Integrating architects and design engineers; title: Performance and feature trade-offs; title: (Over- ) optimizing performance; title: Perfect A ; mediocre B, C, and D; title: The technical purity trap; title: The unbreakable computer; title: Performance-monitoring facilities; title: Counters and triggers; title: Protecting the family jewels; title: Testability hooks; title: Gratuitous innovation considered harmful; title: Validation and model health; title: A thankless job; title: Choosing a metric; title: Health and the tapeout target; title: Metric doldrums; title: Coordinating with other projects; title: Performance estimation; title: The overshooting scheme; title: Psychological stuff; title: Simulator wars; title: Project management; title: Awards, rewards, and recognition; title: The dark side of awards; title: Project management by grass cutting; title: Marginal return from incremental heads; title: Project tracking; title: The experiment; title: The mystery of the unchanging curve; title: Flexibility is required of all; title: The simplification effort. 5. The production phase; title: Of immediate concern; title: Functional correctness; title: Speed paths; title: Chip sets and platforms; title: Success factors; title: Prioritizing war room issues; title: Managing the microcode patch space; title: Product care and feeding; title: Test vectors; title: Performance surprises; title: Feature surprises; title: Executive pedagogy and shopping carts; title: Managing to the next processor; title: The Windows NT saga; title: Product rollout; title: On stage with Andy Grove; title: How not to give magazine interviews; title: Speech training; title: 6. The people factor; title: Hiring and firing; title: Rational recruitment; title: Hiring and the promotion list; title: Firing; title: Policy wars; title: Corporate disincentives; title: The Led Zeppelin incident; title: Exiting the exit bag check; title: Sailboats and ditches; title: Orbiting the bathrooms; title: Management by objective; title: We are so rich, we must be good; title: Burnout; title: 7. Inquiring minds like yours; title: What was Intel thinking with that chip ID tag, which caused such a public uproar? --; title: Was the P6 project affected by the Pentium's floating point divider bug? --; title: Why did Pentium have a flawed floating point divider, when its predecessor, the i486, did not? How would you respond to the claim that the P6 is built on ideas stolen from Digital Equipment Corp.?; title: What did the P6 team think about Intel's Itanium Processor Family?; title: Is Intel the sweatshop some people say it is?; title: How can I become the chief architect of a company such as Intel?; title: Why did you leave Intel?; title: And in closing I'd just like to say; title: Bibliography; title: Appendix; title: Out-of-order, superscalar microarchitecture : a primer; title: Plausibility checking; title: Glossary; title: Index.