"IBM reportedly looked at the production and design capabilities of each company and concluded that "Intel Delivers!""
What a baloney, don't try to re-define the history.
I think your historical vision is slightly aberrated
and encrypted over years. There is another published
interpretation of the same historical facts:
"Intel delivers!" was a slogan to cover up their
"inventive" strategy ("philosophy" if you wish)
of issuing fake product flyers
for chips that were not designed yet, not talking
about being sampled or produced, while the entire industry
had much more conservative approach for future product
advertizing. Intel pulled up colorful prospects of
support circuits for future x86 processors, making
an impression that everything is ready, just take
the whole "set" and sell it. They paid serious money
to sales force to secure as many wins as possible.
In response, Motorola was too honest and put together
much less impressive package of real circuits, and lost
the battle of lies, which ended under another Intel's slogan, operation "Crush'em!".
More, IBM was turned down by Motorola because they were
busy making microprocessors for American car industry,
and could not promise volumes IBM requested at instant.
Intel, on the other hand, had no serious volume customers
at the time, and had plenty of capacity due to lack of demand.
Of course, Intel had to deliver, otherwise it would not
exist today. Under the high timing pressure, what Intel
could deliver? Of course, a bunch of awkwardly-specified
and designed circuits, with ugliness like destructive
reads. Fueled by IBM desire not to miss the inflection
point of Personal Computer market (they were late),
the whole architecture
is widely acknowledged as the ugliest ever existed, which
also caused problems in Operating System implementations
(so do not blame everything on Gates).
"..Hypercache 128-bit CPU is "better," but who will deliver?"
According to Taiwanese sources, delivery of P4 was not
spectacular as yet...
So, I guess, everything has to be evaluated in proper
perspective...
- Ali |
