itanium is dead

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > itanium is dead

travelling wave: Nov 25, 2013

some intel chip dude posted:

One that sticks out in my mind is when the Itanium effort was just getting going. We Oregonians were being systematically and purposely excluded from that effort. HP was worried that HP had brought some kind of intellectual property to the table for Itanium, and they did not want to see that IP appear in a competing line of x86 processors. So at the time they were being very careful to separate these two apart. We therefore knew very little about what Itanium was, we just heard rumors that it's kind of like a VLIW, which is what we did at Multiflow. Papworth and I would look at each other and think, as far as we know there are only two people in this company who know anything about VLIWs and that's the two of us.

Anyway, for some reason, there was an organizational meaning at which Albert Yu could not appear. He designated Fred Pollack, but Fred could not appear, so Fred designated me, and I showed up. So first of all I am two organizational levels down from who is supposed to be sitting there and I ended up sitting next to Gordon Moore. This was probably about 1994 or so. The presenter happened to be the same guy who was in the front of the car from when I interviewed with the Santa Clara design team; same guy. He's presenting and he's predicting some performance numbers that looked astronomically too high to me. I did not know anything about how they expected to get there, I just knew what I thought was reasonable, what would be an aggressive boost forward and what would be just wishful thinking. The predictions being shown were in the ludicrous camp as far as I could tell. So I'm sitting and staring at this presentation, wondering what are they doing, how is it humanly possible to get what he's promising. And if it is, is it possible for this particular design team to do it. I was intensely thinking about what's happening here. Finally I just couldn't stand it anymore and I put my hand up. There was some discussion, but you have to realize none of these people were really chip designers or computer architects, with the exception of Gelsinger and Dadi Perlmutter.

0:13:53 PE: Sorry Dadi
0:13:54 BC: Dadi Perlmutter, he's one of the executive VPs in charge of all the micros right
now.
0:13:58 PE: D A D I

0:14:00 BC: Yeah, his real name is David, he�s an Israeli. Everybody calls him Dadi. And then Pat Gelsinger who was the chip architect, designer in 386 and 486. But most of those guys at this presentation haven't designed anything themselves, they know how to manage complicated large expensive efforts, which is a different animal. Anyway this chip architect guy is standing up in front of this group promising the moon and stars. And I finally put my hand up and said I just could not see how you're proposing to get to those kind of performance levels. And he said well we've got a simulation, and I thought Ah, ok. That shut me up for a little bit, but then something occurred to me and I interrupted him again. I said, wait I am sorry to derail this meeting. But how would you use a simulator if you don't have a compiler? He said, well that's true we don't have a compiler yet, so I hand assembled my simulations. I asked "How did you do thousands of line of code that way?" He said �No, I did 30 lines of code�. Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire future of this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code? [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not mean to be insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy Grove piped up and said "we are not here right now to reconsider the future of this effort, so let�s move on". I said "Okay, it's your if that's what you want."

the whole interview is good if you're into that sorta thing

http://newsletter.sigmicro.org/sigmicro-oral-history-transcripts/Bob-Colwell-Transcript.pdf