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From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.sys.m68k,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: The New Chips
Message-ID: <40674@sun.uucp>
Date: 2 Feb 88 00:46:37 GMT
References: <4746@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <1430@husc2.UUCP> <883@xn.LL.MIT.EDU> <40222@sun.uucp> <889@xn.LL.MIT.EDU>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
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In article <40222@sun.uucp>, cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) writes:
|> Not that Intel did anything particularly special for them that I could see.
|> (I worked there beteen 83-85.). 

In article <889@xn.LL.MIT.EDU> delaney@XN.LL.MIT.EDU (John Delaney) writes:
|> I have heard otherwise from one top technical type at Intel. A project he
|> was running was killed and others he tried to started were stillborn because
|> of interference by IBM. He ended up being ordered to stop certain activities
|> by an executive of IBM, not by Intel's management. I for one am glad to see
|> IBM out of Intel.

Well let me be more clear without violating any nondisclosure agreements I
signed... Intel did not do anything special for IBM because it owned some
percentage of the company, that is not to say things were not done for IBM
as a large customer. Basically, if you buy > $100,000,000 worth of chips from
Intel you can ask them to put things into them, or change things around, or
test to a given speed parameter. Ford does it all the time with the Engine
controllers that Intel builds for them. By the same token if any big customer
throws some money at you to build something, and is either paying for the 
development or preordering some fixed quantity of the final product (which
is the same thing essentially). You build it no? You want an 8088 with 32
bit address registers and a linear address segment? Send Intel $10,000,000
and I am sure they would be glad to build it for you. By the same token
if you are a 'top technical type' and working on a project that is being 
funded by a large customer, you are responsible for meeting the needs of
that customer, so they can tell you, "No, we don't want it to work like 
that, we want it to work like THIS." You don't have a choice really, except
to do it that way. About the only interference IBM ever caused was to 
be very aggressive about verifying the Intel test patterns. Generally,
if you couldn't show them a test pattern that verified a particular spec
they got really upset. And in that regard, I would say that IBM actually
increased the quality of Intel parts significantly because of the additional
testing. Of course that helped everyone, not just IBM.

--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.