Intel: Winning and Losing

Summary

This article continues a lengthy series. You may be interested in the start of silicon valley, Fairchild, the founding of Intel, the start of the x86 architecture, Intel’s pivot to become a processor company, the i960 and i486, the Intel Inside campaign, the FDIV bug and the Pentium Pro, MMX, the Pentium II, and the Pentium III, Pentium M, and the launch of Intel Core.A quick note, up to this point, I have avoided using Intel’s microarchitecture names as the company’s overall product branding and node size were sufficient. From this point forward, I will have to start using Intel’s naming to differentiate products as their product branding became… excessively numeric. Also, to put things into historic perspective as previously mentioned, the Pentium would have been the i586, the Pentium Pro (also Pentium M) would have been the i686, the Pentium 4 would have been the i786, the 64bit Intel Core family would have been the i886.At the start of 2008, Intel was in a strong position. While they no longer had the handheld space, they were the kings of both the desktop and laptop CPU market. No one could rival the performance of their hardware, and no one could rival their manufacturing capabilities. The company did, however, have a gap in their offerings. Intel Atom Bonnell die shot, image from IntelOn the 2nd of March in 2008, Intel introduced the Atom CPU family with the Bonnell microarchitecture manufactured on the company’s 45nm High-K Metal Gate process. Here, Intel reintroduced the classic 32bit x86 design. The first Intel Atom CPUs were in-order, most instructions were not translated into RISC micro-operations, and there was no on-die memory controller. Intel did bring hyperthreading back with the Atom, and they also gave it SSE. Interestingly, the Bonnell Atoms lacked dedicated integer multiply/divide and those tasks were handed off to SIMD floating point units. With in-order execution, memory latency was a serious concern so the Atom gained a 32K L1 instruction cac...