Intel+Hafnium

I always find stories interesting like this one from John Markoff. The story is about how while Intel was behind on power consumption at 90nm, roughly equal at 65nm, they are better than competitors at the 45nm generation. One quote from the story:

Many executives in the industry say that Intel is still recovering from a strategic wrong turn it made when the company pushed its chips to extremely high clock speeds — the ability of a processor to calculate more quickly. That obsession with speed at any cost left the company behind its competitors in shifting to low-power alternatives.

I find it interesting because Markoff gets the story wrong.

Intel first announced this lead back in 2003 at technical conferences. Intel's domination at 45nm has been know for at least 4 years. The reason Intel sucked at 90nm is because while IBM gave their power-reducing technology to AMD, they refused to give it to Intel exceopt under horrible terms (like giving up the design to their x86 processors). Intel refused those terms because it knew it had AMD/IBM beat at 45nm.

In other words, Intel made the choice to sacrifice the 90nm generation (Pentium 4) because it knew it had everyone beat at the 45nm generation.

Apple announced their switch to Intel processors at the 90nm level. This confused many people because Apple claimed they made the switch for power-consumption reasons, but at the time, AMD/IBM had a better power-consuming technology than Intel. This is because Intel shared their roadmap with Apple, and that with a Controe+45nm, they were going to have AMD/IBM solidly beat.