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The point is that they grossly underestimated the impact of the power wall. They were aware of the power issue and you can find early papers by Pentium 4 archit
by psykotic 15y ago
The point is that they grossly underestimated the impact of the power wall. They were aware of the power issue and you can find early papers by Pentium 4 architects like Doug Carmean which address that concern and make it seem like they have it under control. Many engineers at Intel (including the main Pentium 4 architects) must have known the problem was more dire than that. But everyone falls prey to wishful thinking, and changing the bearing of a mammoth ship is not something easily accomplished.
> Pentium 4 was absolutely the right design to take advantage of faster transistors
No, it was a horrible design in many ways, irrespective of those constraints and any wishful thinking about the power wall, and it gave the advantage to AMD for years. Not a big surprise as it was designed by Intel's B team. The Pentium M which has been the microarchitectural basis for their subsequent desktop processors was designed by the A team.
- cperciva 15y agoeveryone falls prey to wishful thinking To be fair, nobody has ever designed a CPU based on current process technologies. Design teams are always saying "we think the process technology we'll end up working with will look something like this...", and based on past history there was no reason to think that the power issue wouldn't get solved like it had the past N times.
- psykotic 15y agoI'm certainly not claiming I could have done better. But the Pentium 4 was such a spectacular failure and Intel's competition managed to navigate that transition well enough that I feel a certain amount of pointing and laughing is justified. :)