Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel

Fun fact: Bob Colwell (chief architect of the Pentium Pro through Pentium 4) recently revealed that the Pentium 4 had its own 64-bit extension to x86 that would have beaten AMD64 to market by several years, but management forced him to disable it because they were worried that it would cannibalize IA64 sales.

> Intel’s Pentium 4 had our own internal version of x86–64. But you could not use it: we were forced to “fuse it off”, meaning that even though the functionality was in there, it could not be exercised by a user. This was a marketing decision by Intel — they believed, probably rightly, that bringing out a new 64-bit feature in the x86 would be perceived as betting against their own native-64-bit Itanium, and might well severely damage Itanium’s chances. I was told, not once, but twice, that if I “didn’t stop yammering about the need to go 64-bits in x86 I’d be fired on the spot” and was directly ordered to take out that 64-bit stuff.

https://www.quora.com/How-was-AMD-able-to-beat-Intel-in-deli...

"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will."

Intel has a strong history of completely mis-reading the market.

Andy Grove, "Only the paranoid survive":-

Quote: Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

- Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel

From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid...

Takeaway: Be paranoid about MBAs running your business.

> Takeaway: Be paranoid about MBAs running your business.

Except Andy is talking about himself, and Noyce the engineers getting it wrong: (watch a few minutes of this to get the gist of where they were vs Japan) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=At3256ASxlA&t=465s

Intel has a long history of sucking, and other people stepping in to force them to get better. Their success has been accident and intervention over and over.

And this isnt just an intel thing, this is kind of an American problem (and maybe a business/capitalism problem). See this take on steel: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno... that sounds an awful lot like what is happening to intel now.

> Intel has a long history of sucking, and other people stepping in to force them to get better. Their success has been accident and intervention over and over.

If one can take popular histories of Intel at face value, they have had enough accidental successes, avoided enough failures, and outright failed so many times that they really ought to know better.

The Itanium wasn't their first attempt to create an incompatible architecture, and it sounds like it was incredibly successful compared to the iAPX 432. Intel never intended to get into microprocessors, wanting to focus on memory instead. Yet they picked up a couple of contracts (which produced the 4004 and 8008) to survive until they reached their actual goal. Not only did it help the company at the time, but it proved essential to the survival of the company when the Japanese semiconductor industry nearly obliterated American memory manufacturers. On the flip side, the 8080 was source compatible with the 8008. Source compatibility would help sell it to users of the 8008. It sounds like the story behind the 8086 is similar, albeit with a twist: not only did it lead to Intel's success when it was adopted by IBM for the PC, but it was intended as a stopgap measure while the iAPX 432 was produced.

This, of course, is a much abbreviated list. It is also impossible to suggest where Intel would be if they made different decisions, since they produced an abundance of other products. We simply don't hear much about them because they were dwarfed by the 80x86 or simply didn't have the public profile of the 80x86 (for example: they produced some popular microcontrollers).