The Pentium Chronicles: The People, Passion, and Politics Behind Intel's Landmark Chips (Practitioners) [Paperback]

Robert P. Colwell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471736171 | ISBN-13: 978-0471736172 | Publication Date: December 23, 2005 | Edition: 1

The Pentium Chronicles describes the architecture and key decisions that shaped the P6, Intel's most successful chip to date.  As author  Robert Colwell recognizes, success is about learning from others, and Chronicles is filled with stories of ordinary, exceptional people as well as frank assessments of "oops" moments, leaving you with a better understanding of what it takes to create and grow a winning product.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...it reads like a novel...The story is chronicled by insider Colwell in a style that commands reader attention...highly recommended." (CHOICE, May 2006)

"…an anecdotal account of its development from someone who was in on it from the start…there is something there for everyone about life in a large organization." (Cool Tech Reviews, March 6, 2006)

"Such a perfect miscellany of…experiences finely blended with humor and reality is a sumptuous feast for engineers and project managers…marvelous piece of computer history." (TechBulletin, February 10, 2006)

"This particular book on the genesis of Intel's groundbreaking P6 programme of the early 1990s...gives us some worthwhile pointers...a worthy book, and worth a recommendation..." (TechWorld, February 7, 2006)

"This insightful book promises to become a classic, and the reader is warned that it is hard to put down." (Computing Reviews.com, February 23, 2005)

"…the book will particularly appeal to engineers working in the computing industry." (Physics World, February 2006)

From the Back Cover

A landmark chip like the P6 or Pentium 4 doesn't just happen. It takes a confluence of brilliant minds, dedication for beyond the ordinary, and management that nurtures the vision while keeping a firm hand on the project tiller.

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. For more than a treatise on project management, The Pentium Chronicles gives the rationale, the personal triumphs, and the humor that characterized the P6 project, an undertaking that broke all technical boundaries by being the first to try an out-of order, speculative super-scalar architecture in a microprocessor.

In refreshingly 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 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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Pr; 1 edition (December 23, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471736171
• ISBN-13: 978-0471736172
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 6.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #544,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #58 in Books > Computers & Technology > Hardware > Microprocessors & System Design > Microprocessor Design

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good read for project managers, January 1, 2006

By 

H. Stone (Princeton, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Pentium Chronicles: The People, Passion, and Politics Behind Intel's Landmark Chips (Practitioners) (Paperback)

I rated this book as three stars because the title promised
more than it delivered. Nevertheless, it is a very good book,
especially for people who have to manage huge projects in
complex technical areas. Colwell clearly is skilled in
technology, and has tremendous insight and experience to convey.

My expectations were different. Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New
Machine created excitement and tension into the development of
computers, at least as of the early 1980s. The machine was
successful for Data General to some extent, but faded as a blip
in history that few remember. Intel's P6, Colwell's baby, is
totally the opposite, selling hundreds of millions of copies in
multiple forms since its inception. Kidder spins magic about
the development process. Colwell tells how to make it happen
-- no magic, just cleverness and grunt work.

What I found most valuable were Colwell's methods for taking
on this huge project. Quantify your goals, quantify the merits
of each idea, and quantify your progress toward the goal.
Without these measurements, you have no idea when you will finish
and whether you will succeed when you get there. In
a field where technology moves very quickly, the difference
between success and failure is not so much if you complete
the job, but when you complete the job.

Colwell pulls some punches because of corporate and personal
sensitivities. He does not tell us very much about the
P6 processor, but what is revealed is done skillfully in
layman terms so that the nontechnical reader can follow the development.
For something this complex there has to be dozens of interesting
facets whose challenges and successful development would
make for a good read. Out-of-order execution, that is, the
ability to reorder program instructions on the fly in order
to boost performance, gets the biggest play. Chefs prepare
courses out of order when they prepare elegant meals. Desserts
may be started first and eaten last, if the dessert preparation
time exceeds the entree preparation time. Colwell uses his own
analogies to explain this, and it works quite well.

Apart from out-of-order execution, very little else is developed.
It may be that Kidder's book actually has more technical content,
but I have not taken the time to make the comparison. The
point is that Colwell comes up short in the technical arena,
and this is a disappointment.

The fact that Colwell is both the author and the project manager
makes for a sharp contrast with Kidder's work because Kidder
was an outsider and was not responsible for technical decisions,
whereas Colwell expends many pages defending his design
choices. The personal involvement detracts from this defense,
because it leaves the reader wondering if the defense is
self-serving or is actually a fair appraisal of the facts.

Sensitivies come to the fore in the final pages when Colwell
describes recognition as well as litigation arising from
the P6 project. Perhaps thousands of people participated
in some fashion over a five year period, and only a few were
heralded by Intel. How do you select them, and how do
you placate the wannabes?

The litigation relates to patent
infringment allegations, which Colwell equates to accusations
of theft of ideas. In reality, patent infringement does not
necessarily involve theft of ideas. The patent system is such
that people can develop products whose infringement with
patents cannot be discovered until after the
products are on the market. (This was the
case in the 1990s when patent applications were secret
for the several years between their date of filing
and the date of their issuing. Currently, patents are
made public immediately after filing, even though
they are not valid yet. This helps reduce accidental
infringement.) Colwell believes the infringement
suit against the P6 that he cites soils his reputation for
honesty. It really does not. Intel licensed the patent
in question, with words that credited the inventor for
contributing to the P6. This incenses Colwell because
the P6 design was done independently of the licensed patent.
An outsider would probably relate the facts with words
less charged with emotion, and the book would improve.

To sum up my views of the book, it has major strengths in
management techniques, and falls short in entertainment value.
The Kidder book as well as Michael Malone's book entitled
The Microprocessor, A Biography, are two that are high in
entertainment that I would recommend ahead of Colwell's book
for reading on the airplane. On the other hand, if your
company has just selected you to move forward its technology
with a horizon of five to ten years, you had better put
Colwell on your required reading list.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read for IC professionals, January 7, 2006

By 

Anders Johnson (San Jose, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Pentium Chronicles: The People, Passion, and Politics Behind Intel's Landmark Chips (Practitioners) (Paperback)

If you are involved in the world of integrated circuits, or considering becoming involved, then you'd be crazy to pass up this book. It's no less than a first-hand account of how the golden age of Intel came to be, as well as how it came to a close.

In the early 90's, the common wisdom in the CPU industry was that a buzzword-complete (out-of-order, superscalar, superpipelined, speculative execution) x86 was simply impossible to sucessfully execute, hence the smorgasboard of then-new competing RISC architectures. The book's author led the architecture development of the project that proved otherwise.

What's truly astonishing about a project of this scale is the vast array of things that have to go right in order to prevent a catastrophe (or, as a colleague says, it's not the rocket science, it's the rock science). Even more amazing is how many things the P6 team fundamentally got right (at least according to my own 15 years of IC experience). I was also delighted to find simple and yet brilliant ideas that were new to me, such as assigning cubicles by overlaying the building floorplan with the chip floorplan.

The parts of the book that I found most entertaining (from the outside looking in, that is) were descriptions of the naive attempts to replicate and exceed the success of the P6 project, largely by deprecating the very mechanisms that led to that success.

A word of warning: If you don't already have a lot of experience with large projects, you'll probably have to resist the urge to disbelieve many of the anecdotes. Obstructing Pentium 4 engineers from knowing their own plan seems ridiculous, but I can assure you that in my years in the IC business, I've seen worse.

Because of the exponential upward trend in realizable complexity, as well as the cost of tapeouts, it seems the future (if not the present) of the IC industry to be predominated by large projects such as the P6. If this is the career path that you have chosen for yourself, then you would do well to heed the lessons taught by this book.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid, practical perspective, March 4, 2006

By 

T. Burket "tburket" (Potomac, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Pentium Chronicles: The People, Passion, and Politics Behind Intel's Landmark Chips (Practitioners) (Paperback)

As may be likely with many readers, I first heard of Mr. Colwell from his IEEE Computer columns, of which I was big fan. Several times I was tempted to send him comments about the insights and occasional humor, but I never did. The same kind of writing and attitude is clearly on display in "Chronicles".

Because other reviewers mentioned "Soul of a New Machine," I agree that it is hard to escape, even though the two books are much different. When I was a young engineer in the early 80s, "Soul" was (and is) a great book. I did not have the experience to grasp some lessons to be learned from the story, and a 1980s version of "Chronicles" would not have hit home, either.

However, Mr. Colwell is completely believable in his anecdotes and in the presentation of the big picture, the project, and countless details both technical and personal. Experienced engineers will no doubt see themselves, their colleagues, and their projects in one form or another. I don't mean just the "Dilbert" moments and inevitable personal clashes, but also the serious business and technical challenges that any complex project must face. I found myself nodding in agreement again and again with his conclusions and advice.

Two reasons I liked Mr. Colwell's columns are that he is not just a techno-geek and that an interesting feisty personality showed through. You see that feistiness at times in the book with stories of taking on the powers that be, for better or worse, without feeling like you are listening to someone covering his tracks to make himself look good. The true engineer comes through, with enough polish to be around executives and to be allowed with customers.