The Pentium Chronicles
"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. Far more than a treatise on project management, The Pentium Chronicles gives the rationale, the personal triumphs, and the humor that characterized the P6 project, on undertaking that broke all technical boundaries by being the first to try an out-of-order, speculative superscalar architecture in a microprocessor." "In 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's beginning through its production.
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14recommend
21mentions
17people
2009–2026years
81% recommend19% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Because of the branding change, history will remember the Pentium (P5). It was really the Pentium Pro (P6) that put Intel leaps ahead on x86 microarchitecture, a lead they’d hold with only a few minor stumbles for two decades.
Bob Colwell (mentioned elsewhere ITT) wrote a fascinating technical history of the P6: The Pentium Chronicles.
- The discipline is called Electrical Engineering, and the high-level roles are typically Architects, Design Engineers, and Validation/Verification Engineers. Those roles in turn specialize into e.g. Physical Design Engineer, Pre-Silicon Validation Engineer, RTL Design Engineer, etc. I recommend a book "The Pentium Chronicles" by Robert Colwell, if you want to learn more about this field before diving deeper into technical details.
- Bob Colwell is awesome! I remember seeing an online talk he made... must be 25 years ago now. He talked about the development of the out of order architecture at Intel, and in general about engineering. He has some really fun anecdotes!
Honestly he is probably a big reason I switched majors from biotech over to computers, robotics and engineering in general... I even remember sending him an email about it and got a response back, wishing me good luck :) Sadly I can't find the email now, it was pre-gmail.
Some really good columns that he wrote for "Computer" magazine: https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/330/colwell/at_ra...
Highly recommend his book "Pentium Chronicles"
Edit: found the talk! It was ee380 at Stanford 2003/2004. Sadly the video links seem to be broken... https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ay0304.html
- That’s why they called it the Pentium and not the 586: on the bench it kept coming out at 585.9999999. I’m sorry.
To pay my way for the silliness: I will highly recommend “The Pentium Chronicles” for a view into that time and place.
It covers the development of the P6 arch, but there is some inside baseball about the P5. And it’s just one of the best books I’ve ever read about really amazingly well-run engineering efforts.
- I believe there is a lot of overlap between the transcript of an interview Robert Colwell did [1] with his book The Pentium Chronicles. I've read and liked both. I'm linking to archive.org's copy as the original site appears to be defunct.
[1] Oral history of Robert P. Colwell (1954- ) Interviewed by Paul N. Edwards, Assoc. Prof., University of Michigan School of Information, at Colwell’s home near Portland, Oregon, on August 24-25, 2009
https://web.archive.org/web/20210726205114/https://www.sigmi...
- This is extremely cool. It sort of begs the question: does Intel have a golden formal model? They must right?
The most recent thing I’ve read about it is The Pentium Chronicles (highly recommended incidentally), but that’s eons ago.
Does anyone happen to know (and be at liberty to share) how the vendors cope with this internally?
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