The Pentium Chronicles (2006.01.31)

Folks,

I'm very close to finishing Robert Colwell's 2006 IEEE book titled "The
Pentium Chronicles". This book provides an inside look at the problems
technical people encounter when working in large teams. Although it is about
making chips (mostly about developing the Pentium-Pro with some lesser
information about the P4) I would say it also applies to software projects.
At least it seems relevant where I'm currently working.

I was surprised to learn that the beginnings of modern RISC technology were
begun in the early 1980's by analyzing VAX execution traces and VAX
micro-code. (Forward, p. xii)

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Chapter 7 has some interesting essays but I'll only mention 5 of the titles
which may be of some interest to some people in this newsgroup.

1. What was Intel thinking with that chip ID tag, which caused such a public
uproar?
2. Was the P6 (PentiumPro) project affected by Pentium's floating point
divider bug?
3. Why did Pentium have a flawed floating point divider (FDIV), when its
predecessor, the i486, did not?
4. How would you respond to the claim that the P6 is build on ideas stolen
from Digital Equipment Corp.?
5. What did the P6 team think about Intel's Itanium Processor family?

8. Why did you leave Intel?

Neil Rieck
Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/links/cool_openvms.html






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