The man who changed Intel

The last major chip design that Mooly Eden convinced Intel to adopt was a failure. As he prepared the design in the late 1990s that would become the Pentium M, he knew he couldn't afford to miss a second opportunity.

Eden's team had come up with a novel design that emphasized power management and interoperability over raw performance, a concept at the time as foreign to Intel marketing executives as the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, where Eden's office at Intel's design facility in Haifa, Israel, was located.

The Israelis on Eden's team were a different bunch from the Intel engineers just outside of Portland, Oregon, who produced most of Intel's prominent chip designs of the era. They were a manager's nightmare, Eden recalled over a recent dinner in Palo Alto, California.

"It's easier to manage 50 Americans than five Israelis. (The Israelis) are undisciplined, they challenge everything, they are almost more Intel than American employees," Eden said, reminiscing over a glass of wine. He was alluding to the demanding engineering culture founded by Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove that he believes has been lost in a land of political correctness and polite management.

The design that emerged from that group of irascible engineers was code named Banias, taking the name of an ancient Israeli city known for its historical significance to three religions. As Eden prepared in 2000 to update a group of Intel executives in California on the progress of the project, prayer seemed like a good idea.

Banias was everything that the Pentium 4, Intel's new desktop processor, was not. Banias was designed to consume as little power as possible, while the Pentium 4 was designed to let Intel steadily increase its clock speed over the next five years or so.

But as the clock speeds of the Pentium 4 accelerated, so did the amount of power it consumed. And in the late 1990s, Eden foresaw that if Intel kept shrinking transistors at the pace it was on during those years, it would soon reach a point where that power would be able to escape from the chip and produce unacceptable amounts of heat.

"We knew we'd hit a power wall before 2000, and we were aggressive in selling it to management," Eden said.

Eden can be an intimidating presence for a slight, bespectacled man. Every time he opens his mouth, whether it's to explain a complicated bit of technology or order dinner, he speaks with a conviction and resolve that stem from his service as a major in the Israeli Defense Force.

In order to force Intel into what he called a "right-hand turn," to avoid that wall, Eden's engineers would have to bring a maniacal focus on reducing power consumption to every aspect of the Banias design, including the CPU (central processing unit), chipset and memory interface, he said.

At the time, Intel tended to design the chipset and processor separately, in part because of Eden's greatest failure at Intel.

After rising to prominence within the company for his MMX (multimedia extensions) enhancements to the x86 architecture, Eden worked on a project called Timna. The Timna processor was designed with integrated components for low-cost PC vendors that wanted a complete product that was easy to integrate into a PC chassis; Intel promoted it as a chip for PCs in emerging markets.