Top Ten Intel Slipups

quickquack sent us a story on tuplay about Intel's top 10 slipups. They all seem to be relatively recent mistakes (rambus, serial IDs etc) so I'm curious if anyone out there can remember some older slipups (hell the company has been around long enough to have some big screwups). Anyway, the article is also somewhat conspiratorial in tone, in an amusing sort of way. You'll enjoy it. Plus its always fun to laugh at Intel *grin*.

Comments

Pentium 4 Recall?

[pb]

This isn't a real top 10; it's a half-hearted attempt. A complete list couldn't fit in the margin of this webpage, though.

Let's start looking...

* Segmented Memory
* Byte-swapping
* To this day, ensuring backwards compatibility with chips no one used
* Screwing over their customers
* Screwing over their employees (see Inside Intel)
* RAMBUS (ha ha ha!)

I'm sure I missed a bunch...

...oh yeah:

[pb@Lee-12-240 pb]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 6
model : 4
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 800.060074
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
sep_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 psn mmxext mmx fxsr 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips : 1595.80
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Re:Pentium 4 Recall?

[Mr T]

Amen brother!

Let me add:

1. only supporting 5? or 7? or however many registers they acutally have.
2. I think segmented memory should be listed again at least one more time but possibly twice. Including all those dman segment registers and index registers.
3. 82xxx parts.
4. stack code
5. variable length instructions
6. x87
7. If you've ever written a boot loader before then you know half the stuff involved is black art that is barely documented. Thank you Intel.

On the other hand, I do give the mcreitd for ia64, it is a beautiful architecture. Now if they'd only drop IA32 support and make it run fast... They should have dropped x86 when they released the 386 and did IA32 the correct way, we'd already have 64bit desktops and it would have been a seemless transition.

Old Joke

[atrowe]

Shouldn't that be the top 9.9999999348 Intel slipups?

Re:Say again?

[Howie]

From a purely profit/bottom-line line point of view they are doing something right (short-term anyway), but both MS and Intel are reviled for their 'creative' business practices rather than their end-of-year accounts, I think.

Intel has a long-standing record of obnoxious behaviour with it's resellers (including apparently threatening those looking to make Athlon boards), it's staff (see inside intel, mentioned elsewhere), reviewers (ask tomshardware about intel) and little respect for customers (seemingly deliberately confusing and incompatible product lines, recalls, plain old bugs). And those blue guys, too.

How about banning the FACE Intel site internally?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anytime you talk about intel screwing the pooch, take a hard look at how they treat employees. Unhappy geeks make bad products. Unhappy environments make good geeks leave for your competitors. Sell your Intel stock and buy some AMD - The irony is a few years ago, AMD had the problems, and intel was king.. And I'm almost positive these problems are the result of deeper cancers growing in management.

Where's divide?

[mwalker]

Floating point divide didn't even make the list?!?
An Intel tech came out to my college in 96 and spent an entire day popping out 60Mhz Chips and plopping in ones that could divide, and it didn't even make the list?

I beg to differ. FDIV should be #2.