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...

This seems like an object lesson in making sure that the right hand does not know what the left is doing. Yes, if you have two departments working on two mutually exclusive architectures, one of them will necessarily fail. In exchange, however, you can guarantee that it will be the worse one. This is undervalued as a principle since the wasted labor is more easily measured, and therefore decision making is biased towards it.