The Race For A New Game Machine:. David Shippy

opposition from Warnock. “I am very certain four gigahertz will push the chip power well beyond the seventy-five-watt power target, but even so, I doubt we can ever come close to achieving the frequency goal anyway. You’ll only demoralize the team if you present them with this unachievable goal.”

      Other naysayers joined in, voicing opinions that bespoke worry about the team, or about the accuracy of Hofstee’s predictions, or the lunacy of reaching for the stars. The din in the conference room grew louder and louder.

      Hofstee spoke clearly and loudly over the roar of discussion: “Guys, guys!” He held out his hands, patting them up and down like a priest bestowing blessings on his congregation. The roar dropped down a notch. “Intel already knows how to do this! They currently have a three-gigahertz fixed-point unit in their Pentium4. If they can do it, we can.”

      Kahle immediately agreed with Hofstee. “I’ve fought the ’dark side’ before and lost,” he said, referring to Intel, “and the last thing I want to do is to come up short again.” He pounded his fist on the table to let us know his decision was final.

      Kahle let us debate the point for a while, but we all knew it was pointless to argue. We settled on 10 FO4, four gigahertz at 75 watts as the mind-boggling goal for the STI chip. This meant a quantum leap in frequency with only a fraction of the power compared to the best-of-breed, Intel-based PCs. These were such far-reaching targets—like projecting into outer space—that we could only trust they would be enough to push us ahead of Intel. I sincerely hoped the chance to grapple with Goliath would motivate my team to overachieve and slay the giant.

      It was 2001, and no one even knew if a four-gigahertz clock speed was physically possible. To start with, it required ultraefficient circuits with no excess fluff or nice-to-haves. We had to invent a new animal that ran like a cheetah, roared like a lion, and ate like a kitten.

      We ended the meeting with concerns weighing heavily on our minds, but before we left, we all stood together and vowed to do whatever it took to achieve the goals. Akrout looked each one of us in the eye, shook our hands, and encouraged us: “Before Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier, nobody thought it was possible. We can do this.” His bold vision for the team and his confidence in us won us over.

      The bar was set, a multicore four-gigahertz microprocessor chip with a power budget under 75 watts! In comparison, the fastest Intel chip at the time was a single core Pentium4 microprocessor running at 1.5 gigahertz. The best IBM microprocessor in production was the Power4 microprocessor running at 1.1 gigahertz. It was an aggressive goal that would push us to innovate on all fronts and would require an extraordinary effort from each engineer. We would have to quadruple the speed in a single generation of microprocessor design and also meet a much lower power budget.

      Our efforts to top the 1 gigahertz mark on the Power4 microprocessor had been a real struggle. We had spent nearly a year in high-level design defining the high-frequency microarchitecture. During the implementation phase, we tweaked timing paths until we were blue in the face. For that design, we didn’t even consider a power budget. These new goals made my head hurt just thinking about them.

      Now that we understood the competition, we were able to share Kutaragi’s bold vision for the future of this little game machine.