peanutbird

Here’s the same thing again but readable.

I will thank them all for you. The space race is what got me interested in engineering so I know where you're coming from. Here are your answers (some long because you asked some great questions):

1. Anandtech and Real World Tech (sometimes The Tech Report) are the best sites with the most accurate information. Especially with Real World Tech, we are sometimes surprised at the accuracy of many of the inferences. Anandtech's latest Haswell preview is also excellent; missing some key puzzle pieces to complete the picture and answer some open questions or correct some details but otherwise great.

2. They get close (see above). There are a couple of things to note here: sometimes the architectural information is not enough, the circuit implementation is incredibly important and that is not often discussed. I guess it's lower on the totem pole. Sometimes we do keep some information from the press that end up in patents, conference papers, etc... But eventually we disclose everything, I think is because we try to outdo ourselves every generation as well as being proud and wanting to share our accomplishment. Ask Apple for a disclosure of Swift.

3. I like Real World Tech the most and find that Anandtech and The Tech Report do good jobs too. I also read Semiaccurate for its humor value and to level set.

4. No and there are little protection mechanisms once it's in customer's hands. By the time they're able to reverse engineering, we're on to the next thing. And even then their implementations tend to not be as good (see AMD power gate efficiency and leakage). Here I referred only to hardware/circuits because security features are a different matter.

5. They didn't have a choice if they wanted to stay in business. They do not have enough silicon revenue to sustain it. In retrospect the ATI purchase was necessary, the sad part is they did overpay by a large margin. Also execution missteps in coming out with their "APUs" allowed us to come very close.

6. In my mind, Netburst, much as it's maligned, brought some very good things internally for Intel design teams. First, unbelievable circuit expertise (the FP logic was running at 8GHz in Prescott stock!). Next, the trace cache which you can see reimplemented in Sandy and Ivy Bridge. Also, SMT. Building a validation team that could validate the beast pre- and post-silicon. The power-perf thinking i.e. frequency through power savings. Finally, the development of tools and project management required to do that kind of extreme design. All of these learning continue to this day and it's a very large contributor to why in client and server CPUs Intel can sustain the roadmap we have.

7. I can't say. But the most important, performance and power sensitive parts are still hand-drawn. Otherwise you can't get past around 1.8GHz on Intel 22nm without losing too much perf from overhead.

8. Yes, we have tons of UG interns and most of our hires have BS. MS is always helpful, but do it for your own personal growth and interest, not to get a job. If you're interested PM me.

ah yes, the classic "autopilot"