
Gelsinger and Meyer: Two CPU Designers Who Changed the World - ohjeez
http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/261817/gelsinger-and-meyer-two-cpu-designers-who-changed-the-world
======
ChuckMcM
I joined Intel in 1984, in '85 when the '386 was coming out (it worked first
pass which was amazing) and started looking at ways to get a 32 bit OS that
fell to a guy named Ken Shoemaker and to some extent me as I had been helping
keep intelca, a UUCP node, up which was running Xenix (Microsoft's version of
UNIX System V). I got to work with Pat who was helping me figure out all of
the 'reserved bits' the Microsoft had used in the descriptor tables on the 286
which were causing the 386 to fall over dead. (We were initially sad that
Xenix didn't boot in 'compatibility' mode, when we figured out (which Pat's
help) why we were rather irritated :-)

He was one of my heroes at Intel, someone totally dedicated to his idea of
what he wanted to do, and by God Intel could either help or get out of the
way.

~~~
yuhong
Look up "80386 ken shoemaker" on Google Groups for some history.

Speaking of the 386, I wrote an article on the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco here:

[http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-
os2-20-fiasco-...](http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-
os2-20-fiasco-px00307-and-dr.html)

------
wglb
Good article, but contains a common misunderstanding: _On the original 8086
there was no way to context switch. You couldn't run a multiprocessing OS on
it_.

In 1983, Mark Williams Company demonstrated COHERENT, a Unix-workalike, on the
IBM PC at the NCC. Later, MWC also produced COHERENT on the Atari ST, whose
processor was a 68000 with no memory mapping. Multiprocessing worked fine on
both.

The PC was actually based on the 8088, which was an 8-bit bus version of the
8086.

~~~
dugmartin
I threw away my Coherent manual during my last move. It was as thick as a big
city phone book and was my goto Unix manual for years.

According to this it was over 1347 pages long:
<http://nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/manual.php>

~~~
wglb
There was a bit of a ceremony at the last MWC get-together--everyone there
signed a moderately dog-eared copy of the manual Fred had. Has a good fraction
of them, but the folks listed on that page are scattered pretty far and wide
now.

------
tcskeptic
Gelsinger spoke at my high school graduation, he was an alumnus of my high
school. This would have been around the time that he was running the Pentium
Pro project. What really struck me about his story was that he had graduated
from the "Vo-Tech" course in my high school, and then bootstrapped himself
through the ranks at Intel via hard work and pursuing education outside of
work. If I remember, the first thing he did was get an associates from Lincoln
Tech or similar.

------
zokier
> With the Athlon, Meyer and AMD caught Intel flatfooted. Athlon introduced a
> dual core processor, and it moved the memory controller from a separate
> chip, the front side bus, onto the chip die. Most important, it was 64-bit

No, the original Athlons were 32-bit CPUs. Then came Athlon XP -line of CPUs,
which still were 32-bit (and still singlecore). After that came Athlon64,
which was 64-bit. And singlecore. Athlon 64 X2, which finally were dual-core,
came couple years later (and Intels dual-core Pentium D were released within a
week of the release of Athlon 64 X2).

I doubt that the original Athlons and Athlon64 X2's had very much in common,
so I wouldn't really say that Athlon introduced dual-core or 64-bit.

edit: I might add that having 64-bit CPU wasn't really relevant on the desktop
back then, as until Windows 7 was released there wasn't a viable 64-bit
Windows available. 64-bit Windows XP was delayed until Intel got its 64-bit
CPUs out, and support for it was always poor. Vista was significant
improvement in that front, but it was Vista.

~~~
rayiner
Athlon 64 (K8 core) was a fairly conservative extension of the original Athlon
design (K7 core). Very similar, except widened to 64-bits, deeper buffers in a
few places, and with the memory controller brought on board.

See: <http://www.realworldtech.com/looking-forward-2002/3/>

------
ableal
Is the illustrator making some subtle point with those three locked-up gears
that cannot possibly move?

P.S. Back in the it day was not only IBM that _"was leery of a single vendor
supplying the vital CPU."_ Having a second source for parts was considered
essential in many cases.

P.P.S. s/iAXP432/iAPX432/ as in <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432>

------
ksec
Well Gelsinger and Meyer are both already well known for anyone who has
followed anything slightly in CPU world.

I would be more interested to know insider story why Gelsinger left, or pushed
out.

