Intel's Patrick Gelsinger on the hot seat

Patrick Gelsinger is an electrical engineer. He joined Intel in 1979, worked on the design of the 80286 and 80386 microprocessors, and was the chief architect for the 80486 chip.

On the 30th anniversary of the x86 architecture's birth, he talked about why it has been so successful.

Intel and Microsoft in a sense grew up together. Did you have any interactions with Bill Gates early on?

I had numerous interactions with him over the years. He was one of the smartest and most aggressive guys in the industry. He was always attacking, pushing, striving for more.

I remember at one point he had less-than-flattering things to say to me about the 80386. I was a junior engineer at the time, and he was already a legend in the industry. I started arguing with him. It was quite incredible. Everyone else in the room fell silent as Bill and I were going back and forth in a very aggressive manner. The senior Intel guy -- after we had a little break to cool the air -- told me I wouldn't be needed for the rest of the meeting.

So, how did the 80386 turn out?

The 32-bit 386 was the turning point in the industry. The 80286 was a 16-bit architecture. At the time people said, "What do you mean 32 bits? That's for mini computers and mainframes." They derided us for being extravagant. They said 64K [for memory addresses] was plenty. I had many conversations with press people and analyst about what applications I could possibly conceive of that would need that much memory.

What are some other key events that you witnessed in the evolution of the x86 architecture?

It was at that same time [in 1986] that the PC-compatible machine moved from IBM to Compaq. When PCs moved out from under the shadow of IBM, it really [created] an industry-standard platform.

Also, I'd point to the move to the Pentium Pro [in 1995]. It was a dramatic architectural leap to what's known as an out-of-order architecture [in which instructions could be executed out of order]. We just took the best ideas of computer architectures from the minis and mainframes and implemented them better, because we had a superior canvas to paint them on, called silicon.

The x86 faced a huge competitive threat from RISC computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What was your role in that?

At the time, I was leading the development of the 486 at Intel while working on my master's degree at Stanford. My thesis adviser was John Hennessy [now president of Stanford University]. John and David Patterson were really known as the authors of RISC.

John and I had three public debates about RISC. I argued that even though the [CISC architecture of the x86] was a little bit slower, by the time you can develop new software for the RISC machine, we've made the [x86] machine that much faster. I said, "Already, John, your architecture is a failure because it can't deliver the software value that is already available in the x86." It was a particularly pointed comment in the debate, and he turned to me and said, "Who's your teacher, anyway?" And I knew he'd be giving me my master's diploma in just a few days.

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