and citronella candles to keep the mosquitoes at bay. Akrout was in particularly high spirits, and the more he drank, the more he unconsciously slipped French or Arabic words into the conversation—something Kahle and I affectionately called Chekib-speak. Every once in a while, something got lost in translation, and Akrout backed up to explain. After about the fifth time, I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of my chair. I guess we were pretty loud, because Mary, Kahle’s wife, came out to tell us to quiet down. The kids were in bed.
The silence might have lasted a full two seconds after she went back inside, then Akrout picked up right where he’d left off. He and Kahle took off on a tangent, fiercely debating some minute technical feature of the chip. No detail was too insignificant, for Akrout was such a geek at heart. Even as a successful vice president of one of the most powerful corporations in America, he could still hold his own against our top circuit designers. He loved technology; he was on fire about it.
Akrout could argue with Kahle all night long, but I didn’t want to squander this opportunity. We weren’t alone all that often. There was just one thing I wanted to hear from him. “What’s keeping you awake at night?” I asked, interrupting the friendly banter. “What’s the bottom line? The worst fear?”
Akrout replied without hesitation: “We don’t have any idea what Intel has up their sleeves, what they might bring out of the shadows in response to STI’s challenge. The home computing environment, not just games, is the ultimate target for all three STI partners, but Intel still dominates the PC market with over eighty-five percent of the market share. Intel also provided the chip for Microsoft’s Xbox, the most significant threat to the PlayStation line. We need to know what to expect next in their products.”
Intel was and still is, the number one semiconductor chip manufacturing company in the world. They had a yearly revenue of $40 billion, giving them both the dollars and the engineering talent to go head-to-head with any company in the industry.
We sipped our Scotch—had a nice buzz going—and discussed Intel’s potential for a while. Akrout was right. We didn’t really know our enemy anymore. The excitement in the Design Center was almost palpable, and my team was revving up for a serious race, but did they know where the finish line was? What could we offer that would beat Intel? That was really the question of the day. We had to know where our competition was heading.
I drove into the parking garage right behind Akrout the next morning. I wasn’t normally an early bird, but he was. I glanced at my watch just to double check. Yes, his routine changed, not mine. He usually arrived early enough to park his BMW sedan in the same convenient first-floor spot in a nearly empty garage, but today I followed him to the fourth level before we came upon some empty slots. Maybe he felt as rough as I did after our night with Kahle and got a late start. It made me feel better to think that he was no more Superman than I was.
Then I watched him climb out of his car. He was practically wrinkle-free, all crisp and neat and bright eyed. On second thought, I decided, he had probably already attended two business meetings by phone, sent twenty e-mails from home, and made a dozen phone calls while he drove into work. He grinned at me, and we walked together from the garage to the office building, though I had to pour on a little speed to keep up with his jaunty pace. He chattered cheerfully about the beautiful weather, and I grunted occasional responses. Obviously, the Scotch affected us differently. Maybe he was Superman after all.
Akrout always came in with that sunny smile on his face, patting the backs of the engineers he met along the way to his office, stopping to chat with someone by the coffee machine. Junior engineers were utterly stunned when Akrout called them by name and asked questions about their specific design work. His interest was genuine, and every engineer sensed the sincerity in his words.
Most days I saw little of Akrout. He spent his time framing the big picture, getting support from his peer executives, clearing away the barriers that threatened the Design Center. He assessed and reassessed the strengths and weaknesses of the STI partnerships. He dissected and studied the assumptions behind the business case that told us this venture made good financial sense. He queried experts on the future market potential for this breakthrough product. He placated customers. On top of that, he directed all chip development for Apple’s desktops and laptops, and Nintendo’s GameCube. A very busy man indeed.
We parted at the elevators on the third floor, but as Akrout stepped away, he grinned and said over his shoulder, “What is Intel thinking, and what are you going to do about it?” I nodded and kept walking toward my cubicle. It was too big a question to answer that early in the morning.
Akrout enjoyed a very close partnership with Apple, so he was keenly aware of how difficult it was to unseat Intel, the reigning king in the PC business. He stood at Apple’s side for years, loyally working with them to create the perfect product roadmap that would propel them ahead of the competition. It was hard, demanding work, and they had not won yet. Though Apple (with IBM chips) had at times outdistanced Intel in terms of processor performance, they were still behind in terms of raw chip speed. Akrout hoped he might finally have the right ingredients to put both Apple and the STI partners ahead of his old enemy. He was the eternal optimist, and I prayed we wouldn’t disappoint him.
To get an answer for his concerns about Intel, Akrout enlisted Dr. Peter Hofstee, one of IBM’s top research engineers, to explore the competition for our next-generation microprocessor and help define project goals to ensure a win. Hofstee’s claim to fame came from his involvement in inventing the first chip in the industry to break the one-gigahertz processor speed barrier, the ultimate Mt. Everest challenge to a chip designer pushing the leading edge of technology in the late 1990s. Hofstee, a brilliant researcher, obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from the California Institute of Technology, a school that produces some of the best computer engineers in the country. Originally from the Netherlands, he decided to stay in the United States after he finished his studies and even accepted a faculty position teaching computer science and chip design at CalTech from 1995 to 1996.
After sending Hofstee off to get the scoop on Intel, Akrout instructed Jim Kahle and me to define what we thought would be the most aggressive design parameters we could possibly achieve, and then to stretch beyond that. He wanted the STI product to beat all existing records, and then when Hofstee returned with his projections for Intel, we would see that our stretch design would trounce the enemy.
Kahle and I had confronted Intel during our days at the Somerset Design Center. Back then, a new computer architecture referred to as a RISC architecture was the kicker for our product, the thing that made our chip stand out among the competition. Instructions are the fundamental directions, the recipe, that tell the hardware what to do. We all believed a highly efficient RISC machine could be Apple’s wedge into Intel’s domination of the PC market. It was supposed to provide higher performance and higher frequency at a lower cost. Up until that time, Intel retained the top spot with their tried and true X86 Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) chips, the brains for virtually all PCs. The RISC approach relied on the fact that most software applications actually use only a small subset of basic instructions. Our work at Somerset focused on optimizing this reduced set of instructions to run faster than the older CISC architecture. The problem was that PC owners needed to port all their old legacy software programs from their old systems to their new ones, giving Intel a definite advantage with every upgrade.
In my first job assignment at IBM, I got a nice exposure to both the older CISC approach and the newer RISC approach while I cut my teeth on computer architecture and logic design. IBM hired me in June of 1985 in Endicott, New York, the birthplace of the company and much of the corporate tradition. In the 1960s and 1970s, IBM staked its claim to fame on the s/360 and s/370 mainframe computers designed and built in New York. However, in the 1980s, DEC and their popular VAX minicomputers started eating away at the low end of the mainframe market. Endicott’s Glendale Lab was responsible for delivering a crushing response to this threat with a product called the 9370.
The
