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To: tcmay who wrote (136095)	5/25/2001 8:37:49 PM
From: AK2004	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Tim re: Now that most of those folks have left, or been purged, this may explain why AMD is having some troubles following through on the obvious--and deserved--Athlon success. well, then what would be Intel's excuse? let's face it it is not Intel that created x86 demand but rather IBM's problem with MOT. Regards -Albert

To: tcmay who wrote (136095)	5/25/2001 9:56:31 PM
From: brushwud	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

The 29K was a very well-regarded chip... It stood out among the other "high-performance microcontroller" chips due to its high-profile cooling-tower heatsink and dissipated more heat than any of them. And wasn't it still in bipolar technology, when everyone else was moving to CMOS? The earlier 2900 product line was a lot more interesting. Those slices were twice as wide (4 bits vs. 2) and twice as fast (50 ns vs. 100 ns) as Intel's 3000 series. AMD drove Intel right out of the bipolar business at that point. I believe even AMD's success in recent years has a lot to do with the infusion of "Intel genes"...Vin Dham, etc. You really make me laugh! Vin Dham was equally loved at both Intel & AMD. And you left out Dirk Meyer, your fellow Intel alumnus and VP of the Computation Products Group at AMD. He's probably a better computer architect than anyone else who ever worked at Intel. But he must have thought life was just too short to spend it in the Constructive Confrontation Culture you & Paul grew up in (and retired early from) at Intel.

To: tcmay who wrote (136095)	5/26/2001 11:30:42 AM
From: greg s	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Tim, re: it looks to me to have been the same "high performance microcontroller" niche/space as the Intel 960 was in. Absolutely. I spent a good part of my career at Intel fighting the "printer wars" in the i960 group. The 29K was a formidable competitor. In those days, the architecture that was used by HP was, by default, the "big dog" in the printer market. And the printer market was the "big segment" for high-end embedded microprocessors. I worked in a group of program managers and engineers focused solely on winning HP designs and handling the care and feeding of the designs once they were won. We even created custom variations of the i960 architecture (jointly developed by Intel & HP) to secure some of these designs. (Aside: my time working in this group was probably the most rewarding in my career at Intel). After years of battle between the 29K and i960, AMD abruptly dropped the market. The market was tough, with printer manufacturers such as HP, Lexmark, NEC, etc. demanding ever higher performance at the price of last year's solution. Intel cranked up the design machine, churning out the i960Jx series then the superscalar i960Hx series. I don't think AMD had the wherewithal to fight a major design war on both the x86 and 29K fronts and chose to concentrate on the x86 battle. The margins in the embedded market have always paled in comparison to margins in the reprogrammable market. It was probably the right decision for AMD, IMHO. Enjoy your posts, glad to see you on the Intel board. Kind regards, greg

To: tcmay who wrote (136095)	5/29/2001 7:49:17 PM
From: Saturn V	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Hi Tim, Ref < I would count the 29000, aka the 29K, as a major attempt to pioneer a major new architecture. The 29K was a very well-regarded chip, often used in high-performance laser printers > Did not get time to react to your statement. AMD developed the 29000 several years after the microcontroller market had been defined. And developing a new microcontroller is not pioneering a new general purpose processor. You do not have to worry about standards and infra structure headaches. It takes a much smaller investment. Microcontrollers have also been the graveyard of several failed general purpose processors! The National 32000 and the MIPS come to mind right now. The same team which created the excellent 29000, was responsible for the disasters on the K5. They made such major goofs, that the entire team was fired en masse after the NextGen acquisition. My point is that a new general purpose computing architecture takes an order of magnitude greater effort than a microcontroller.