Intel admits Pentium D was a "rushed" hack job
If there's one truism in life, it's this: if you're not the lead dog on the sled team, the scenery never changes. For pretty much the first 25 years of PC computing, Intel was the lead dog, with AMD coming in at a distant second. My, how times have changed when you have a lead Intel product developer publicly admitting that Intel's latest Pentium 4 dual-core flagship, much ballyhooed by Intel, was a "rush job" that was hacked together at the last minute due to pressure from AMD.
The speaker of these words was none other than Jonathan Douglas, principal engineer at Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, and the pressure he was alluding to was none other than AMD's highly-successful line of Athlon 64 X2 and dual-core Opteron chips. Unlike Intel's offerings, the AMD chips feature separate memory controllers and bus structures, effectively functioning almost as well as two separate sockets. The Intel design instead puts two CPU cores on one memory controller and data bus. Speaking at the Hot Chips conference held at Stanford University last week, Douglas compared Intel's approach to "trying to fit into the pair of pants you saved from college."
