The Pentium Chronicles: The People, Passion, and Politics Behind Intel's Landmark Chips 1st Edition

It's really a treat. It should be in the bookshelf of a grad student or practioner in the fields of computer and electronics engineering.It is not written by some professional writer, instead, it is a book written by a engineer, with the very first-hand experience of the development of P6 architecture. If this book should have some imperfection or even mistake, I will take a psychological perspective to anylyze it -- just like I analyze my own development memos. 8-) As a reader of At Random, I can say that the writing of Mr. Colwell is comparable with those professional writers.BTW, I think the subtitle is quite fit for the content of this book.

Really great! I enjoyed this book - rare opportunity to see inside of complex engineering projects. Excellent book indeed.

I didn't really like the book. The book is about how the Pentium Pro was created at Intel, but the writing was bland and otherwise uninteresting. The author appears to have a massive ego and justifies a bit too many decisions.Although I don't expect a unbiased perspective, too much of the book is devoted to how great Intel is and how cool the Pentium Pro was, and how much credit the Pentium Pro team deserved. Errors were always the fault of "management" or other outside forces.Overall, the only part of the book I found interesting was a technical analysis of how the Pentium floating point error came to be, and how, as one might expect, it was caused by a last-minute decision. Incidentally, the Pentium fdiv bug had nothing to do with the Pentium Pro; it was just one of the sections in the appendix.

As may be likely with many readers, I first heard of Mr. Colwell from his IEEE Computer columns, of which I was big fan. Several times I was tempted to send him comments about the insights and occasional humor, but I never did. The same kind of writing and attitude is clearly on display in "Chronicles".Because other reviewers mentioned "Soul of a New Machine," I agree that it is hard to escape, even though the two books are much different. When I was a young engineer in the early 80s, "Soul" was (and is) a great book. I did not have the experience to grasp some lessons to be learned from the story, and a 1980s version of "Chronicles" would not have hit home, either.However, Mr. Colwell is completely believable in his anecdotes and in the presentation of the big picture, the project, and countless details both technical and personal. Experienced engineers will no doubt see themselves, their colleagues, and their projects in one form or another. I don't mean just the "Dilbert" moments and inevitable personal clashes, but also the serious business and technical challenges that any complex project must face. I found myself nodding in agreement again and again with his conclusions and advice.Two reasons I liked Mr. Colwell's columns are that he is not just a techno-geek and that an interesting feisty personality showed through. You see that feistiness at times in the book with stories of taking on the powers that be, for better or worse, without feeling like you are listening to someone covering his tracks to make himself look good. The true engineer comes through, with enough polish to be around executives and to be allowed with customers.

I am biased as I worked for Bob.

If you enjoyed "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder, you don't want to miss this one. It will establish a new benchmark, I think, for much quoted books in the decade folowing its publication.

Review of Colwell’s "The Pentium chronicles" by Paul F. Ross Thackray, Brock, and Jones (2015) report in their “Essay on sources” that “Robert Colwell’s The Pentium chronicles (2006) offers a rare inside glimpse into creating microprocessors (p 513).” Having learned by reading Thackray et al that Intel’s leaders understood the wisdom of creating integrated chips____________________________________________________________________________________Colwell, Robert P. The Pentium chronicles: The people, passion, and politics behind Intel’s landmark chips 2006, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken NJ, xix + 187 pages____________________________________________________________________________________that manufacturers of many kinds of electronic devices would want to use, thus designing for a very large market, I purchased Colwell’s account in the hope of learning how the designers looked ahead and determined what their next Intel chip would be like … expecting more detail than “more capable” and “cheaper” as design guidelines. The reading of Colwell (2006) has been a disappointment. An electrical engineer, born in 1954 and reared in a working family’s home in Pennsylvania, Colwell’s post PhD career took him to DARPA – the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – and then on to Intel in 1990 where he “was involved in the development of the P6 core. The P6 core was used in the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and Pentium III microprocessors, and designs derived from it are used in the Pentium M, Core Duo and Core Solo, and Core 2 microprocessors sold by Intel. (Wikipedia, 2016).” Colwell retired from Intel in 2000. I did not find a description of the process of ‘looking ahead to what the next chip should be’ that I hoped to find. Rather I found Colwell describing the human interactions and communication failures that are all too common in organizational life, Colwell seeming to think he had unique insights, and Colwell advising approaches to project management (‘hire the right people,’ ‘set the right goals,’ etc. …) which he appeared to think he had discovered. He described his managerial style for winning attention to these processes. This reader’s background in behavioral and management science and career in research and application of leadership methods and performance measurement in America’s Fortune 50 corporations urged that Colwell’s advice is both wrong and (perhaps happily) is being ineffectively delivered to his readers. I was not able to stomach completing the read … one of a mere two or three books in the last 400+ books I’ve started to read that I’ve not finished reading.Bellevue, Washington4 June 2016Copyright © 2016 by Paul F. Ross All rights reserved.ReferencesColwell, Robert P. The Pentium chronicles: The people, passion, and politics behind Intel’s landmark chips 2006, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken NJThackray, Arnold, Brock, David C., and Jones, Rachel Moore’s Law: The life of Gordon Moore, Sillicon Valley’s quiet revolutionary 2015, Basic Books, New York NYWikipedia, 4 June 2016 See the entry under “Robert P. Colwell.”

Despite being fairly short, this book is very difficult to read. Most of the text focuses on what the author thinks you should be learning from his experience, and any aspect of storytelling that might have engaged the reader is relegated to a few too short anecdotes. There is little attempt to introduce characters or even to explain what was done - instead we have to read that projects should be split into four phases that require different resources. I've read other similar books - such as To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) - that are excellent, and show what this book could have been.