Inside Intel Book

If you're sick of the upbeat tone of many computer industry sagas, you'll definitely enjoy Inside Intel, Tim Jackson's investigation into the secrets of Intel's success. Instead of the usual cast of blue-eyed whiz-kid billionaires, you'll find a darker story of brilliant technical coups tempered by serious blunders and savage competition. Naturally, technical innovation lies at the heart of the story, but Intel didn't always get it right--and sometimes teetered close to ruin. Success didn't come because the company never made mistakes, but because it could fight back savagely when it did. That the fight wasn't always clean, nor the personalities involved particularly pleasant, makes for a fascinating story. Inside Intel is also a reasonably sophisticated layperson's history of integrated circuits (ICs) and microprocessors. Technology is Intel's heartbeat and anyone interested in understanding the company needs to know why the 4004 was a watershed invention, why the Motorola 68000 was such a threat, why CMOS technology didn't save Intel's DRAM business, and what really caused the Pentium floating-point bug. While the author steers clear of technical minutia, interested readers still come away with a good understanding, not just of Intel's technology, but that of rivals like AMD, Cyrex, Motorola, and the PowerPC Consortium. In short, this is a fascinating mix of high technology and overcharged personalities that will appeal to anyone interested in computing or high-tech business.Read More