The Pentium Chronicles: The People, Passion, and Politics Behind Intel's Landmark Chips

It's really a treat. It should be in the bookshelf of a grad student or practioner in the fields of computer and electronics engineering. It is not written by some professional writer, instead, it is a book written by a engineer, with the very first-hand experience of the development of P6 architecture. If this book should have some imperfection or even mistake, I will take a psychological perspective to anylyze it -- just like I analyze my own development memos. 8-) As a reader of At Random, I can say that the writing of Mr. Colwell is comparable with those professional writers. BTW, I think the subtitle is quite fit for the content of this book.

On the first page of this book Dr. Colwell gets his marching orders from his boss: 'Your job is to beat the P5 chip by a factor of two on the same process technology. Any Questions.' 'Three,' he replied. 'What's a P5?' What's the process technology plans? Where's the bathroom.' The P5 became the Pentium chip. The process technology doesn't matter in this book as it was the same. And he found the bathroom. Dr. Colwell's new chip, the P6 came to the market first as the Pentium Pro, the same basic design was subsequently modified as the basic core for the Pentium II, Pentium III, Celeron, Xeon, and the current Centrino products. But the details of the chip aren't the strong point of the book. It's the organization and structure of a how a big development team works. From the little details like finding an unused storage room to use as a conference room where the blackboards wouldn't get erased, to hiring, firing and getting the product out. I can't help but compare this with Tracy Kidders book 'The Soul of a New Machine' written twenty or so years ago. Kidder was a better writer, but Colwell was the one in charge, making the whole thing happen. I would have liked to see a little more technical detail, but I've been in this business a long time and have more interests along these lines than the average reader. As it is, it is an excellent book on project management and I enjoyed it very much.

If you enjoyed "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder, you don't want to miss this one. It will establish a new benchmark, I think, for much quoted books in the decade folowing its publication.

I'll give this book five stars, because it captured me. Bob is great at writing: I read him as a columnist for 4 years and I really enjoyed this book. I particulary liked the tactics and advices on how to make it happen, on how to build a large team that really works. The only thing that disappointed me is the lack of very inside informations about the chip, the design solutions, the "eureka" moments about out-of-order execution: the creative moments, in short. The management part is great, but I miss a part more focused on the engineering side (however the title is clear: people, passion and politics)

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.