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Wow.same, I worked in building 5 in 1997 - I recall "going pee next to Andy many times" - other than this interaction with him I didn't really talk to him much.

I recall asking the question then "why can't we stack cores on top of each other" and being told by very senior engineers how stupid that idea was...

Working at Intel was actually the golden age of my gaming experience; I worked in the game development lab and played video games to test SIMD extensions 18 hours a day.

I recall going out to a balcony in SC5 and having a cigarette, there was some person from finance there, and after chatting with him for a bit I asked why he was working so late; he was trying to figure out how to recode the finance system to add additional spaces to the finance DB to allow for the many billions they had in the bank. Apparently the fields were initially set too short to handle the numbers as large as they were dealing with...

Andy was an incredible person.

As for "going pee next to Andy many times", Szilard was trying to switch from physics to biology and was housing for ideas at Karolinska.

He visited Klein, who happened to follow him to the bathroom and saw blood in the pot after him. As a non practicing doctor, but avid observer, he quickly diagnosed him with cancer. Szilard then signed up for one of the highest doses of radiotherapy in humans. He survived both the therapy and the cancer and lobbied afterwards to set up EMBL (with Viki Weisskopf, patterned after CERN).

ChuckMcM, with apologies for veering off-topic, you've got so many interesting stories re Intel, Sun, etc. Have you considered writing a book about your experiences? I'd buy it.

> I went to a design update meeting on the 80386

I remember dreaming about a 386 back in the day when I was a kid using a soviet 8086 clone..

It seems so incredible that these things were created by real people.

I always kind of thought that aliens were building these chips .. Still do sometimes.

its probably all those old Intel commercials where it shows alien looking robots creating the chips!

He was CEO when I joined. Highly respected guy.

Thinking about it and "second sourcing", it is funny how not that long afterwards they used marketing tactics like the 486SX/487SX fiasco to compete with AMD's 386DX. I wonder what would have happened if for example Intel bought Compaq instead back in 1991 (instead of Compaq having to cut R&D for example).

I imagine we would have ended up with even more Smart Array RAID controllers; a truly terrifying dystopian vision.

Unlikely in desktop PCs.

Compaq also made x86 server equipment, which is one of the reasons they were assimilated by Hewlett Packard. Compaq developed the initial versions of the Smart Array RAID controllers, and were working with Intel (amongst others) on the thankfully defunct Intelligent I/O Architecture (I2O) on which the Smart Arrays appear to have been based.

One of the reasons I left Intel for Sun was that Intel had just realized that "lots of people" making x86 chips was a bad thing for their control of the market. There were no less than 6 suppliers of 8086 chips. But with the 80286 and the 80386 it became clear that "owning the processor" so that they could claim a big chunk of the profit on every PC sold was very very important to the company. That strategy, while unpopular with the technical community, worked out very well for Intel.

Andy was a driving force behind that shift, his view that "only the paranoid survive" was that you had to believe everyone was out to get you in order to avoid surprises from your "friends." And as much as I hate to admit it, he was correct in that view.

Yea, I know the history. The point being that Intel buying say Compaq would obviously allow them to claim Compaq's profits instead, and maybe eventually driving all other PC makers out of business (by the low margins) instead of making the same undifferentiable "beige boxes".

I was thinking he meant buying x86 competitors or burying them via patents. Intel both patents and buys patents on plenty of CPU-related tech, esp for x86 compatibility. Alpha and Transmeta CPU's come to mind immediately. Things just kept disappearing until we were down to basically three companies: Intel, AMD, and VIA. AMD had to pay Intel for I.P. with VIA being a niche player running losses despite some good tech.

So, I.P. control from purchases or threats could keep Intel on top of competition for a long time. Worst case was they end up in an oligopoly position where they can still pull huge profits.

Everyone else (ARM etc.) has a monopoly on the ISA or they don't even publish it (NVIDIA etc.) Intel actually makes perhaps the most open commercially significant platform.

Not really. Unlike Intel, ARM licenses their ISA to anyone who's willing to pay. Every single modern iPhone has an entirely in-house Apple implementation of the ARM ISA and they're definitely not the only ones

That's far from true. We've been able to license ARM and MIPS ISA's plus implementations for a long time. They and Intel defend theirs with patents. SPARC, the most open of old ones, could be used without license fees or patent risk at all. You just had to make it ISA compatible then pay a $99 fee. Gaisler has a SPARC CPU and pile of SOC HW under GPL that ASIC proven even on radhard, space applications. Enterprise versions selling for a premium exist from Oracle and Fujitsu.

I'd say Intel is not that open at all given the secrets remaining, patent protections, and lack of competition. POWER is slightly more open with PowerPC embedded implementations. ARM and MIPS are more open since they actively license implementations. The most open is SPARC ISA hands down given every aspect is usable with source available for several CPU's.

POWER is FAR more open than Intel. You can actively license it just the same as ARM (not to say the licensing terms are the same, but the concept is).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation

I put it between Intel and ARM because I still didnt know what I got at what price after reading OpenPOWER website. I have that data for ARM, MIPS, and SPARC.

So, what's an OpenPOWER license cost, the royalties if any, and does that come with ASIC-ready implementation?

Well, currently shipped SPARC's volumes are relatively low AFAIK, and ARM and MIPS (now IMG) are in fact monopolies, they just happen to license the ISA & the implementation because they choose to do this. Intel does not choose to let AMD and VIA ship x86 CPUs and in this sense it's less of a monopoly. Of course you could argue that ARM is more open than x86 in some other significant sense; here I think that the PC is a more open platform than perhaps any widely shipped ARM-based system, in terms of the variety of available operating systems and software and the ease of developing such software, especially if said software is to have reasonably wide applicability and long shelf life, and also in terms of the degree of control that any single entity has over the platform.

In general I think that the "vertical disintegration" where you have fabs which are open to everyone making chips integrating cheap IPs, instead of companies with their own fabs, has destroyed "openness" - it used to be the case that you knew exactly what the hardware was doing, and it is now the case that you need to sign a draconian NDA to program most of the components in most chips, and this option is only available to select "partners." x86 is an older product and hence more open than most successful newer products; it was perhaps less open than its competitors at the time, which in part explains why it was more successful than those competitors... (A closed platform is a kind of a high-risk, high-reward game.)

OK. Well, we have to consider that. There's companies making money on the ISA's and implementations. Intel's main business is the ISA and implementation of x86. By that standard, they have quite a huge chunk of a oligiopoly with only 1 real competitor and a niche competitor in low-power space. For ARM, there are at least 10 companies that fully licensed and extended the I.P. plus academics doing their own. Additionally, Intel and AMD extend their own stuff in their semi-custom business whereas I can extend ARM or MIPS myself after licensing it. The PC builds on blackboxes from Intel and AMD plus a few others that differentiate at the board level. Barely a comparison to ARM, MIPS, etc differentiating at SOC and transistor level.

So, Intel is dominant in their ISA, its implementation, and in a profitable way. ARM and MIPS don't come close despite their monopolies on the ISA's themselves.

"x86 is an older product and hence more open than most successful newer products; it was perhaps less open than its competitors at the time, which in part explains why it was more successful than those competitors... "

This is news to me. Far as I knew, it dominated desktop due to backward compatibility and other strategies. It wasn't open in many ways. SPARC and PPC even adopted OpenFirmware while Intel still had closed microcode updates. It's still the least open ISA of the high-sellers.

"In general I think that the "vertical disintegration" where you have fabs which are open to everyone making chips integrating cheap IPs, instead of companies with their own fabs, has destroyed "openness" - it used to be the case that you knew exactly what the hardware was doing, and it is now the case that you need to sign a draconian NDA to program most of the components in most chips"

That I agree with. Fortunately, there's work from companies and academics to change that with actual silicon being prototyped. This will be an uphill battle but is becoming feasible. The main drawback is that the cost of EDA and prototyping means closed I.P. might stay the norm. Only exception is if we can get academics to put key I.P. in public domain as they develop stuff. PCI or USB here, analog stuff there at 45-90nm at least. Make it cheaper.

"Far as I knew, it dominated desktop due to backward compatibility and other strategies. It wasn't open in many ways." - we're agreeing here, I said "it was less open than competitors at the time, which was perhaps one reason for its success." The only part we're disagreeing about is, I think it's more open than newer products (as a part of the general trend of hardware getting more closed.)

I worked on chips which included both ARM and MIPS CPUs; I don't think it makes ARM or MIPS "open" in many of the ways that matter, because, for one, programming those chips without the consent of the company that made them is very problematic both technically and legally. So ARM and MIPS in practice are "open" to select partners who make chips which are in turn "open" to select partners, unlike the PC where you have not only Windows, Linux, BSD etc. but things like MenuetOS and TempleOS and it's both legal and technically feasible to do this kind of thing. Of course this isn't due to Intel or anyone else behind the PC being more benevolent than other vendors, it's just an older platform and closeness wasn't or at least didn't seem as important for profitability as it is today. Here BTW Intel's focus on backward compatibility is very helpful - low-level software for the ARM or MIPS becomes obsolete more quickly and developing working low-level software for newer version of these in a timely manner might require partnering with the vendor, AFAIK. Basically ARM and MIPS are way more open than x86 to me as a chip architect (although an ARM architecture license AFAIK costs $30M or so... meaning that a lot of chip makers ought to take whichever implementation ARM provides and you're at their mercy to a much greater extent than you'd often desire), but they are far from fully open and then they're way less open than x86 to the users.

And then both MIPS and ARM are pretty old... the trend of really closing everything, where you can't get any spec without partnering with the vendor, didn't take off until maybe the 2000s.

I wonder what it'd take for open IPs to gain significant traction in hardware. It's easy to come up with reasons for them to fail or succeed but it's not easy to predict which reasons will end up more dominant.

"I worked on chips which included both ARM and MIPS CPUs"

That's really neat. Especially as I work a little on methods for secure HW/SW design. Mostly done with digital side of ASIC methodology but still custom digital and analog stuff to figure out. Appreciate any tips you have on such threads where I'm exploring.

"So ARM and MIPS in practice are "open" to select partners who make chips which are in turn "open" to select partners, unlike the PC where you have not only Windows, Linux, BSD etc. but things like MenuetOS and TempleOS and it's both legal and technically feasible to do this kind of thing. "

So, back then, ARM and MIPS I.P. holders didn't allow a PC-like product to be built with their chips? It was custom negotiated for every product with no platforms available? I could see you calling that less open and the ecosystem hit it would have.

"I wonder what it'd take for open IPs to gain significant traction in hardware. It's easy to come up with reasons for them to fail or succeed but it's not easy to predict which reasons will end up more dominant."

Inherently safer or language-specific ISA's like jop-design.com or crash-safe.org. Microcontrollers where any royalties are eliminated to further lower costs. OEM's targetting hobbyists and/or idealists that want maximum freedom. Anti-subversion efforts where multinational pride kicks in with an ISA like RISC-V being remixed allows everyone to feel like the owner. Tools or projects for processor design in academia where they just want something to work with and build rather than screwing around with I.P. and legal risk. Wait, that last one already happened and I already named it. ;)

So, given you've done hardware, what do you think of my recommendation that market wanting OSS hardware just build on Gaisler's SPARC products? There's a configurable CPU (Leon3) and substantial I.P. library already GPL'd or licensable. Probably closer to MIPS than ARM in price. There's also a 4-core version. One could put them right in an ASIC with Pi- or Novena-style boards w/ SPARC ecosystem (esp BSD/Linux) leveraged immediately. Alternatively, really my touch, is swapping out SPARC-specific stuff (eg instruction handling) for RISC-V so all the I.P. just magically supports a RISC-V solution. Open I.P. can gradually be developed to replace it, maybe keep using Gaisler's proprietary source where compelling, stuff is 90+% ASIC-proven from start, people can inspect, paid get paid, everyone is happy.

Nowadays there is ARM SBSA which aims to resolve the problems and allow a PC-like product to be built (the main reason such a thing didn't exist before is lack of interest). In the meantime the GPL helps to ensure at least the source code for the drivers for the Linux kernel are revealed.

BTW, notice the "server" in the ARM SBSA name.

Regarding the PC ecosystem vs the ARM and MIPS ecosystem - I'm not sure what happened back when MIPS and ARM made chips, just that most of their volume came when they were IPs, and at that point chip makers were keeping things rather closed. I'm pretty sure both Intel and say MS do not see the PC as the ideal model for their business, they just happen to profit more from it than they would from an attempt to kill it.

Generally, today ARM will sometimes break OS-level code between releases - something Intel would never do - and I think ARM does this because it sells an IP, not chips, and so in any case the only way to sell a CPU to a consumer is through a chip maker licensing ARM and then porting OSes to the new chip - and the chip maker can handle ARM-related breakage while they're at it. But it does not follow that ARM is to blame for most chips being closed and/or hard for an OS unsupported by the chip maker to work on the chip across its various generations; I'd guess that most of the difficulty comes from the chip-level breakage and lack of documentation, not CPU-level issues of this sort.

So IMO it's not that ARM or MIPS actively prevent(ed) the emergence of an open platform like the PC while Intel was pushing for open platforms; it's that Intel happens to have succeeded mainly selling chips for an open platform, while ARM and MIPS happen to have succeeded mainly selling CPU IP for various closed platforms.

Regarding the SPARC IP that you mentioned - I'd have to look at it more deeply to have an informed opinion. Generally for a chip vendor who wants source code, as opposed to wanting an open source IP, MIPS is just fine, they'll give you the source. Otherwise what you want from your CPU vendor varies (ARM for instance gives you not just the CPU but everything you need to build say a cellphone application processor - probably not the best one on the market, but a completely functional one. At the level of the CPU itself, you might want a bunch of things - like hardware virtualization support, or cache coherence with other processors, etc. etc. - that different vendors support differently, if at all.) So as I said, I don't think I have a serious opinion about the product you mention.

I really find it hard to understand what drives these people. Let's say he cornered the entire market and sold 100% of CPUs. What then? Why?

Don't they want the best for the world, and isn't that clearly going to come through competition? I just cannot fathom their motives. Same for any line - fast food chains? Do they want everyone in the world to eat their burger every meal? Why?

I guess I need to buy one of his books to try and find out!

One of the chief arguments for ARM and other MIPS-like ecosystems: they are much more diverse, therefore evolve better on the long run than a tied-down monopoly (Amd used to push Intel on many fronts, ie 64 bits, SIMD, RISC core etc)

btw: Intel isn't a CPU manufacturer. It is a factory for manufacturing processor factories: they are one level of abstraction higher.

> btw: Intel isn't a CPU manufacturer. It is a factory for manufacturing processor factories: they are one level of abstraction higher.

Can you elaborate that a bit? I mean I'm completely ignorant about CPU manufacturing, your statement is very intriguing.

What exactly do they manufacture when you say they manufacture factory of CPUs? Design?

> I just cannot fathom their motives

Maybe start with "swimming in your vault full of money like Scrooge McDuck".

Nah I don't think this is what gets them out of bed every day.

isn't that clearly going to come through competition?

Not if you think you're the best! Consider that: if you are in the position where you think you have by far the best product, then wouldn't you want to share it with everyone? In that case, the competition is working against the world's best interests.

They want their company to continue to exist so they can continue doing what they do. How did it work out for all the other CPU vendors from 1990?

In this case, they were second-sourcing meaning that they were manufacturing Intel's CPU designs.

Go and ask the ghost of Zilog past about competition rewarding the best technology.

If Intel bought out Compaq in 1991 history would be different. I used Compaqs around that time. They had small pizza boxes with 386 and 486 CPUs in them.

I'd imagine Intel would make Compaq PCs with their other chips like the 80980 and other chips.

Maybe make Unix workstations with RISC chips using HP-UX.

> it was "Put one foot in front of the other and make progress against the goal now." kind of focus.

i am finding in my own startup that this is the only way progress is made. you just keep going, if at all possible.