For a perspective from CPU designers, checkout the talk given at Standford by Bob Colwell on Feb 18, 2004. It is about half way down this page titled "Things C

For a perspective from CPU designers, checkout the talk given at Standford by Bob Colwell on Feb 18, 2004. It is about half way down this page titled "Things CPU Architects need to think about": http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ay0304.html http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/ay0304.html Bob lead the Pentium Pro effort all the way through the Pentium 4. The talk is funny, fascinating, includes history (like how pointless that change was that led to the Pentium FDIV bug), how the Itanium was approved, change, bugs and many other things. In the Q&A session at the end, one of the questioners is Dave Ditzel who headed Transmeta.