Читать книгу The Race For A New Game Machine: - David Shippy - Страница 10

At the heart of every successful technical accomplishment, there first existed a bold vision that inspired the team.

Onward Through the Fog. Live Music Capital of the World. Hillary Is Hot! You’re just jealous because the voices only talk to me. Save the Giant Flying Vampire Armadillos.

THIS STRANGE ARRAY OF BUMPER STICKERS on the Volkswagen van in front of me held my attention a moment too long, and I almost missed my turn. I take pride in being a nonconformist, but in Austin, Texas, where “Keep Austin Weird” is the city slogan, I clearly reside deep in “normal” territory. It was February of 2001, and little did I know that I was about to jump on board the ride of my life.

I parked in front of the Gingerman Bar, the epitome of Austin’s funky hippie-yuppie lifestyle. It was once a favorite hangout of mine, and I hadn’t been there in years. I came to meet an old friend who wanted to discuss a job with me. A secret interview, he’d cautioned seriously when he phoned. I came mostly out of curiosity, for I was not in the job market. I glanced around the parking lot but didn’t see anyone I knew, no one to break my cover—I already disliked all this cloak and dagger stuff.

A cool breeze cut through me when I stepped out of my car, making me glad I’d swapped my baggy cargo shorts for a pair of faded jeans. Sandals flapped against my heels as I walked. No suit, tie, and spit-shined shoes, no well-crafted resume in hand. I heaved open the massive door, pulling against the wind. I barely squeezed inside before the door sucked closed behind me with a bang, nearly hitting me in the heels. I glanced into the entryway mirror and brushed a hand across my hair, but it was stubborn and chose to stick straight up despite my best efforts. Good enough, I thought, as I flapped a hand at my disheveled reflection.

Dim overhead lights and meager sunlight from the grimy windows did little to brighten the spacious bar. I snagged my Oakley sunglasses into the top buttonhole of my Hawaiian shirt.

“Shippy!”

I turned and moved in the general direction of the voice. Even though I couldn’t see well enough to identify the speaker, I knew who it was: the man I came to see. My eyes adjusted, and I spotted Jim Kahle in a corner booth. I lifted a hand in recognition and headed that way, weaving between a jumble of mismatched tables and chairs where a handful of patrons sipped tall glasses of beer.

I studied my old friend as I approached. He was fortyish, but he looked as lean and athletic as ever. Yellow polo shirt tucked into faded blue jeans. Well-worn running shoes. He still brushed his wavy sandy-blond hair straight back, but now it revealed a deeply receding hairline and a sunburned forehead.

He stood up to greet me, and we shook hands and patted each other on the back. Two years had passed since the last time we met, so all week I’d looked forward to seeing him again.

Kahle and I shared a long intertwined history as microprocessor designers at IBM. We first met in the fall of 1989 when I transferred from Endicott, New York, to Austin, where Kahle became my manager. We clicked right away. We both possessed an aggressive style, a hard work ethic, and a “victory or death” attitude about work and life in general. We found common interests outside of the office including soccer, water skiing, and drinking beer. Ten years later, at the height of the technology boom, I left IBM to seek my own mythical dot-com fame and fortune at a local startup company. Kahle stayed on at IBM, diligently climbing the corporate ladder, becoming a Distinguished Engineer, a recognized force throughout the company. His team produced the microprocessor chips that put IBM in the lead in high-performance Unix servers and powered Apple’s resurgence in the personal computer market.

I slipped into the opposite side of the booth, sinking into well-worn burgundy leather. I teased him about the need for secrecy. “What’s up with that?” I asked. “Don’t tell me…the CIA wants us to solve the problems with global security, right?”

Kahle just smiled, looking every bit like the cat that swallowed the canary. “We’ll get to that,” he said. He had a secret worth sharing, but he was going to play it for all it was worth. He bought the beer, so I didn’t mind waiting.

We talked about our families, caught up on personal events of the past few years, sipped on frosty mugs of dark beer. Kahle’s three children were a couple of years older than my two sons, but still close enough in age that we had a lot in common. Parenting can be the universal leveler.

A half-hour passed, and I glanced at my watch. When would Kahle get to the heart of the matter? Silence settled heavily into a momentary gap in our conversation, and the polite pleasantries ended abruptly.

Kahle leaned across the table, whispering inspired words charged with intensity, filled with passion. He described a powerful partnership recently formed between Sony, Toshiba, and IBM to build the processor for the next version of the PlayStation game console. Sony was the biggest game player in town, with over 55 million PlayStation and PlayStation 2 units sold worldwide. Game developers flooded the shelves with over 430 million copies of game software for the PlayStation line. There were no official announcements of the partnership yet, and Sony insisted on keeping it quiet for as long as possible. Hence the need for secrecy.

“With this project,” Kahle said, “we have the potential to hit a home run and take over the entire home computing market. Or”—he paused and shrugged his shoulders—“we could just hit a single and go build a cool chip for a game machine the whole world loves. At the very worst, we’d have some fun.”

Both prospects intrigued me.

I took a long pull from my beer. These babies weren’t just toys—they were high-performance computing engines. Music to my ears. I’d worked on microprocessors for everything from mainframes all the way down to notebook computers. Designing a game machine would be a welcome change, and the software would be much sexier than the corporate stuff running on most of my previous designs.

“Okay. You’ve got my attention,” I said.

Kahle squirmed and continued with his story, setting the bait. He represented IBM when these three high-tech giants collaborated on an idea for the PlayStation 3, a revolutionary game machine intended to turn the electronic games industry upside down. I was shocked at the extraordinary amount of money involved in this endeavor. Sony, Toshiba, and IBM agreed to spend $400 million over five years to develop the processor for this machine. Kahle’s eyes gleamed as he told me that this path-breaking, joint development venture, dubbed the STI Design Center, would be located right here in Austin. On top of that, this powerful threesome planned to spend billions of dollars for two state-of-the-art chip fabrication facilities. Sony also agreed to pay IBM hundreds of millions to set up a production line at their new facility in Fishkill, New York. That’s a lot of money to spend before a single chip rolls off the line.

“Sony’s Ken Kutaragi was the instigator who brought the three companies together for this adventure,” Kahle said with just a hint of triumph in his voice. He looked disappointed when I failed to respond with appropriate awe. “Kutaragi is president and CEO of SCEI, Sony’s video games division.”

“Oh.” I wiped off some of the gathering condensation on my mug, stalling for a moment while I considered this. “I’ve been a little busy the last few years.”

“But he’s known everywhere as the father of the PlayStation.” Jim emphasized his words with extended arms, palms up. He studied my face, apparently looking for some aha moment, some sign that I recognized this famous man.

“Jim, I barely know what a PlayStation is.”

“Hmph,” he said, shaking his head, still unable to fathom the depths of my ignorance. “Okay. So I’ll give you a quick education. Kutaragi single-handedly led Sony into the game world, and the PlayStation game machines and software became the heart and soul of Sony’s business model. It’s their most successful product ever. With the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2’s phenomenal success in his pocket, Kutaragi felt he must and could realize a grander dream for the broadband market looming on the horizon. He wanted the PlayStation 3 to be a personal computer that also played games, with a chip that could take on roles in many broadband applications, from on-demand television to online gaming to real-time video chats.”

As J. R. R. Tolkien might have put it, I thought, “One chip to rule them all / One chip to find them / One chip to bring them all / And in the darkness bind them.”

“Remarkable,” I said, struck more by Kahle’s admiration for this man than by the story itself. Kahle is not one who is easily impressed.

Kahle was on a roll and went on to describe Kutaragi’s reputation as an excellent problem solver and a forward-thinking engineer. “That proved true enough during the project planning stages, though I also found him to be demanding and unyielding. To achieve his vision, Kutaragi needed help from experts in processor development and silicon manufacturing. Sony brought expertise in consumer markets, Toshiba in high-volume products and we, IBM, brought microprocessor and system design experience.”

“That’s a pretty high-powered partnership for just one chip-development effort,” I mused.

“Oh, it may be just one chip, but it’s much more than just one product,” Kahle replied. “The building-block potential of this processor inspired each company to nurture visions of using this design in their traditional product lines. Toshiba plans to incorporate it in high-end televisions, and IBM is contemplating using the new chips in high-performance servers.”

Maybe I didn’t know Kutaragi, but I still recognized the rare opportunity this partnership represented. When Kahle took a breath, I reached across the table and shook his hand, congratulating him on his accomplishment. “It’s a well-deserved honor for you to serve as IBM’s point man for negotiations with Sony. Outstanding!”

Kahle modestly claimed he was just lucky, but I knew differently. He was bright, maybe even brilliant. After graduating from Houston’s Rice University, he accepted an assignment with IBM’s research group, the beginning of a career-long tie to the folks in Yorktown, New York. His first assignment took him into design tools—money-saving, software-based programs that improved the quality of a design by automatically checking for errors, cross talk in the wires, and other design points that exceeded acceptable limits. He integrated those cutting-edge tools into the design process for the chip that eventually put IBM in the lead in high-performance Unix servers.

Kahle spent nearly twenty years of his life at IBM, serving as a key player on several highly successful development efforts including the breakthrough server chip known as the Power4 Gigaprocessor. He was very smart and very aggressive, big reasons why he was one of the most influential engineers at IBM.

I recalled the first time he invited me to play soccer. I scrounged around in my closet, found my old cleats, and brushed off the dust from a few years of neglect. Half an hour on the field and I was stiff, sore, and exhausted, but not giving up. I joined Kahle on the front line, and we tag-teamed the ball toward the goal. When we failed to score, Kahle ran across the field and screamed in my face for not hustling enough. He prided himself for being the fastest, most aggressive player on the field. He made up for any lack of ball-control skills by out-hustling his opponents. He was a bully, but I admired his competitiveness.

Whether playing soccer or designing a new chip, losing was not an option. Kahle was quick to reject those who didn’t agree with him, and more than one IBMer’s career suffered for crossing him. The Sony chip lay on Kahle’s career path; it was his next stepping stone. Nothing would keep him from success. I was more than a little flattered that he saw me as an asset in that venture, but I remained on the fence about joining up. I enjoyed the impact I could have in a small company. Going back to a big company like IBM wasn’t exactly appealing.

I drained my mug and then motioned to our waitress for another round.

Kahle described his new design center, which fell under the auspices of IBM’s Microelectronics Division. “I spent the first few months of the STI partnership serving as the director in charge of both business and technical issues, even helping to write the contract. Boring stuff. As you can imagine, I was dying to get involved in chip design. The technical complexity of the chip soon consumed my interest, my energy, and my time, leaving little for the business side of things. Paperwork fell into complete disarray, I had no time for staffing, and the executives started to worry.”

“I doubt anyone could handle both of those challenging jobs,” I sympathized. As I well knew, Kahle was a technical wizard. He would perform much better in an engineering position than he would in a management or business role.

“Maybe not, but I quickly found out that I didn’t want to handle both jobs. I took the title of chief engineer, focusing on what I do best, chip architecture. I let others handle the contracts, financial controls, staffing, and other adminis-trivia. Finally, I was in the right place.”

I had no doubt he’d made the right decision. He wielded a strong influence over any IBM team, and they generally accepted his technical command as absolute rule.

Kahle finally zeroed in on the point of our meeting. One of the first jobs he needed to fill was that of the chief architect for the PowerPC microprocessor core, the “brains” of the chip. “That’s where I need you, Shippy. You’ve always delivered high-quality innovative solutions for me.”

I liked the sound of that. As the chief architect, I would take on the coveted role of the technical lead, defining the fundamental blueprint for the PowerPC microprocessor core. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity, the kind of job every engineer desires. It would allow me to exercise all of my creative and innovative engineering muscles and have a major influence on the design. I leaned back in the booth, ignoring the creaking of the old leather seat, and looked Kahle in the eye. Cutting-edge technology, a chance to be in the thick of things, a key leadership position, ground-floor opportunities—who wouldn’t be interested?

Kahle sensed a win and immediately moved to close the deal. “This project is extremely important to the IBM Corporation, and folks like you, hired into key positions, will be heavily rewarded.”

I smiled at that. He definitely knew the way to my heart. I said, “You just caught yourself a fish.”

We spent another hour or so reminiscing about the good times we’d enjoyed together in the mid-1990s at the Austin-based Somerset Design Center, a joint venture between IBM, Motorola, and Apple. Somerset challenged Intel for the PC market with a sleeker, cleaner, PC version of IBM’s standard Power server chip, called PowerPC. The Somerset office lay outside the main IBM campus, purposefully free of most of the bureaucracy found in industrial giants, thus creating the impression of a small, privately-run company. It was IBM’s bid to give its entrepreneurs the freedom to create and to invent. Kahle’s team delivered the first Somerset microprocessor, the PowerPC 603, and then Kahle brought me on board to architect the follow-on microprocessor, the PowerPC G3. Exciting times! The engineers on my team actually believed they could beat Intel, and I guess I did, too. We worked long and hard on our chip designs, and we frequently ended the day on a sand volleyball court at the design center or at the nearby Arboretum drinking beer together. We were a tight group.

Kahle threw big parties for the design team at his house, nestled on the cliffs overlooking Lake Austin. Always a savvy investor, he built his house back in the 1980s before the rest of the world discovered Austin. The folks at his parties were rowdy and consumed lots of beer and margaritas. Kahle cooked his famous “Kahle burgers,” delicious, if technically inelegant—thick, hearty, and smothered in cheese. Classic rock tunes from the 1960s and ’70s played in the background. There were generally two camps of folks at the parties: The first camp wanted to talk nonstop about work (shoptalk). They could pontificate ad nauseam about the details of their work. The second camp, which I belonged to, wanted to talk about anything but work. Both camps liked to drink a lot.

We were having so much fun, we didn’t even realize we’d awakened a sleeping giant. It took several years, but ultimately Intel crushed Somerset just as they did all of their competitors. Kahle fondly referred to those days as “taking on the dark side.” There was a negative perception of Intel in the engineering world due to the technology giant’s monopoly of the PC microprocessor design space. On the software side, there was a similar perception of Microsoft, which dominated the software used on PCs. Microsoft and Intel, nicknamed the “Wintel” pair for their combination of the Windows operating system and the Intel microprocessor, presented a formidable foe. Even facing that serious challenge, Somerset was still a fun and intellectually stimulating environment that Kahle and I both badly wanted to re-create in the STI Design Center—but this time, we meant to win.

The landscape of high-performance microprocessor design had changed significantly since those days in Somerset. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and their once formidable Alpha microprocessors had disappeared. Sun Computer had lost a lot of their market share with their SPARC architecture. Supercomputer maker Cray Research had also gone by the wayside. Other minicomputer and mainframe shops like Data General, Amdahl, and Hitachi had mostly disappeared. There were really only two horses left in the high-performance microprocessor race: the X86 architecture produced by Intel and AMD, and the PowerPC architecture produced by IBM and Motorola. These microprocessors accounted for the majority of the PC and high-performance workstation business.

The only other exciting microprocessor technology was the nimble ARM Architecture—Advanced Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) Machine, which was pervasive in the emerging mobile and handheld space. Most of the rest of the electronics companies adopted a System on a Chip (SOC) philosophy, where they embedded X86, PowerPC, or ARM microprocessor cores into their own custom chips. They differentiated their products by adding their own “secret sauce” intellectual property (IP) to the chip. For example, a disk drive chip might include an embedded microprocessor core alongside a patented read channel controller. An automotive chip paired an embedded microprocessor core with a patented auto controller IP.

Three weeks after that secret meeting at the Gingerman, I found myself wearing an IBM badge…again. I would not have predicted it in my wildest imagination. When I resigned from IBM in 1999 to join a little startup company, I was certain I had left big company bureaucracy behind. The high-tech dot-com era was at its peak, and my pot of gold was calling. But Kahle convinced me otherwise. I walked back into IBM’s familiar pink palace on Burnet Road, very happy that I had not completely burned my bridges when I left.

Jim Kahle welcomed me back with a tour of his fancy facility. IBM signed over several floors of this high-rise to house his multicorporation team, and Kahle spared no expense in remodeling the space.

“Visiting executives sometimes criticize the plush surroundings, but the investment was for the team,” he said, as we strolled down a hallway lit with contemporary high-end wall sconces. “The modern uniformity bonds us together, levels the playing field, and rids all of us of petty jealousies over prime real estate.”

We walked past a handful of offices on our tour. One was Kahle’s, I knew. Kahle said the other four belonged to the IBM director, Chekib Akrout, his counterpart Sony and Toshiba directors, and the software leader. Everyone else on the team, including the managers, got a cubicle.

Kahle proudly ushered me past many empty cubicles to my own box, the best one in the building—a corner unit on the third floor with floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. I turned my back to Kahle to hide my disappointment, looking instead out my new window at tall cedar trees swaying back and forth on the wooded lawn. The amount of money sunk into the modernization effort was impressive, but I would gladly have traded my new high-tech cubicle any day for an old, outdated windowless office with a door that closed. I didn’t tell Kahle that.

He pulled out a sliding whiteboard to demonstrate that I could increase the privacy in my cube, but that did nothing to reduce the distraction from the high noise level. No stranger to cubicle environments, I had always found it difficult to concentrate when I could so easily hear the phone conversations of my neighbors across the partition. Even quiet conversations among my fellow engineers disturbed my thought processes. Numerous break-out rooms lined the walls of the open floor plan, providing space for private conversations and small meetings, but I worried about the negative impact on the team with the heightened scrutiny and lack of privacy.

Kahle introduced me to my Japanese partners and a handful of IBMers as we continued our tour. My stomach clenched. So few people. Who was going to help me do all that design work Kahle promised?

The second and third floors sported large break rooms with snazzy new-age green glass walls laced with zigzagging copper tubes. Modern kitchen appliances and café-style furniture matched the look.

Kahle and I returned to his office. File cabinets lined one wall, while photos of previous chip designs, various project plaques, and patent awards adorned another. I called it the “I LOVE ME” wall. Every engineer has one. His desk was a familiar mess, cluttered with stacks of technical papers and journals. We sat at his modular, natural-maple desk while he gave me a short history lesson on the Design Center.

“My first discussions with Ken Kutaragi occurred just a few months ago in a hotel in Roppongi, Japan, the location of IBM Japan’s head office. I offered him every chip option we had for a potential PlayStation 3 processor. The idea I liked the best and pushed the hardest was a derivative of the Power4,” Kahle said.

“Oh, man, that would’ve been sweet!” I said. Kahle and I had invested a great deal of our own blood, sweat, and tears into the development of the Power4, and we would have been so proud to watch this baby take over a high-volume consumer market like the PlayStation 3. This highly successful server chip was IBM’s first microprocessor to break the one-gigahertz clock barrier. That long-standing performance obstacle had once seemed insurmountable. From the early 1980s—when Intel’s first 8086 PC microprocessors ran in the low megahertz range—to the turn of the century, it had taken nearly twenty years of evolution to break this barrier.

“Unfortunately, that idea didn’t capture Kutaragi’s interest.” Kahle pointed to a list of products on his whiteboard. A maze of notes and arrows swirled around the barely decipherable column of names. “So I proposed all these other IBM PowerPC derivatives, including the line of embedded cores developed by the team in Raleigh, North Carolina. By the end of the Roppongi trip, I had pitched the entire spectrum of IBM’s processor cores, from the very simple and small up to the very large and complex.”

I studied the list for a moment. “So Kutaragi rejected everything. Did he give you some idea of what he does want?” I was beginning to worry that Kutaragi had some pie-in-the-sky dream that wasn’t achievable in real hardware.

“Oh, yes, he did.” The excitement in Kahle’s voice ramped up. “He challenged us to create something new to leapfrog Intel’s technology, something like a supercomputer-on-a-chip. This is Kutaragi’s bold vision. His chip will be the heart and soul of a bleeding-edge gaming console. He insists on both multigigahertz frequency and very high floating-point mathematical computation capability.”

Floating-point units are included in many microprocessors, but they involve some very complex circuitry with a high transistor count, which translates into costly silicon real estate. Due to this complexity and size, they create much greater challenges for achieving high frequencies.

I nodded my head, nearly salivating over the opportunity to invent something new. This supercomputer-on-a-chip would provide high precision as the chip adds, subtracts, or multiplies very large decimal numbers. “I agree that’s a deadly and difficult to beat combination. Tough to build, though,” I said.

“You bet,” Kahle answered. “A typical game application uses millions of floating-point computations to create animated graphics. Higher precision means that the processor can calculate the physics involved in moving, bending, jumping, crushing, colliding, bouncing, and so on, with a higher degree of accuracy, and thus provide more fluid character movement in crisp, realistic scenes.”

That made a lot of sense to me. I already knew that millions of computations determine every pixel position in every scene that flashes across my computer or TV screen. The faster the position of the final pixel is calculated, the more lifelike and fluid that game becomes.

Kahle understood very well what Kutaragi wanted, but in order to get IBM to commit to a major new processor development effort, I knew he would have to engage in and win a major turf battle with IBM’s Server Group, our former team. I was sure the folks that had worked with Kahle and me on the Power4 processor would fight fiercely to own this processor and would push for a Power4 derivative as the base design. “What do our friends in the Server Group have to say about all this?” I asked.

“Plenty. They argued that one of their own homegrown server chips or a derivative thereof could just as easily fulfill Sony’s game machine requirements and IBM’s requirements for new broadband product development. Why invest millions of dollars into something new when off-the-shelf processors fill the bill?”

“Can’t argue with that line of thinking,” I said.

“True, but I’ve already been down that path with Kutaragi, and that idea won’t fly. He doesn’t want what they have. As much as I dread it, a futile and time-consuming turf battle might possibly be the only way to make progress and clinch a deal with Kutaragi. Even with a corporate approval in my pocket, I have no doubt there will continue to be bloody battles over which in-house team—Server Group or Microelectronics Division—will win the job.”

I sympathized with Kahle’s reluctance to enter into a turf war because I carried my own scars from previous processor wars within IBM. In the mid-1980s, the IBM mainframe processors created most of the revenue in the company. These processors were inside computer products priced from hundreds of thousands of dollars to over a million dollars per system. Processor design houses located in Endicott, Kingston, and Poughkeepsie, New York, as well as Rochester, Minnesota, and Boeblegen, Germany, fought to carve off a piece of the pie and cover the broad range of computing power and cost. Each group, seriously handicapped by the “not invented here” syndrome, wanted to design processors in their own unique way while they created and protected their market niche. Eventually, market demands dictated lower volumes for these mainframes, forcing IBM to cut back on the number of processor designs they could support. This resulted in massive layoffs at some of the company’s oldest established sites, from Endicott and Kingston, New York, to Rochester, Minnesota. Politics, not engineering, drove many of those decisions. The loudest and most aggressive leaders typically won.

At the end of the turf wars, the IBM locations that continued to own major processor design work could justify hiring and maintaining a large engineering staff. Those locations that did not own a major mission were forced to downsize. It was survival of the fittest. With job security in mind, I had jumped at the chance to escape Endicott and move to Austin, which soon became IBM’s center of competence for processor design. Lucky I made the jump when I did. While Endicott entered a long period of instability, Austin was able to continue to hire and sustain jobs for the best and brightest.

Based on my previous experience at IBM, I realized what a prize the PlayStation 3 would be for the owning engineering organization. That organization could justify their existence for years to come, and I could see why Kahle would fight tooth and nail to secure this highly coveted processor design.

Dominique Fitzgerald, a diminutive French woman who served as an executive administrative assistant, interrupted our discussion to inform me that my presence was required in the office of Dr. Chekib Akrout, the vice president in charge of entertainment and embedded processors. Akrout took the reins from Kahle as IBM’s business director for the STI Design Center when Kahle moved into the chief engineer’s slot. Dominique ushered me into the executive office next door, then quietly ducked out.

Akrout immediately stood and walked around the desk to greet me with a firm handshake and a ready smile bracketed by deep dimples. We settled into our seats, one on either side of the big maple desk. My new boss looked much younger than I had expected, probably barely forty. He was well over six feet tall, rather large boned, and dressed in trendy brown slacks and a tan long-sleeved shirt that looked classy and expensive but still casual enough to blend into a blue-jean culture. He spoke with a heavy French accent, but his black hair, olive skin, and dark brown eyes made me think of Greece, or Italy, or somewhere in the Middle East.

“I’ve heard good things about you,” he said.

As the discussion progressed, we became instant friends, sharing a similar sense of humor and a mutual respect for each other’s technical ability. We quickly veered off a discussion about the project and launched into a friendly exchange of personal histories. Born in Tunisia, Akrout received a B.S. in physics and two Ph.Ds (electronics and physics) from the Université Pierre & Marie Curie in France. Astonishingly, he was fluent in no less than five very dissimilar languages.

Dominique poked her head into the office to announce that Akrout’s wife was on the phone. I offered to step out for a moment to give him some privacy, but Akrout motioned for me to remain seated. He carried on a short rapid-fire phone conversation in French. I smiled and relaxed, realizing that his mastery of foreign languages provided all the privacy Akrout needed. When he hung up, he picked up his conversation with me, hardly missing a beat.

Akrout started his IBM career in 1982 as a circuit designer in the elite high-speed memory design group. These folks designed memory chips that were much faster than the standard memory chips attached to most PCs. They laid down intricate patterns of millions of transistors, leading edge work that tapped technical skills as well as artistic talent. Akrout showed a flair for management and far-reaching technical and administrative acumen, overseeing a technical smorgasbord that included everything from general-purpose microprocessors to application-specific chips to complex mixed analog/digital designs. In 2000, as director of high-speed and broadband microprocessor development at IBM’s Microelectronics Division, Akrout managed the development of PowerPC processors for Apple’s Macintosh desktops and for Nintendo’s GameCube. In 2001, his role expanded to include responsibility for the entire STI Design Center. He was a star, and the Design Center was lucky to have him.

A man of great charisma and technical depth, Akrout inspired trust both from his own team and from the heads of other companies who wanted to do business with IBM. He was well liked and trusted by the Japanese directors within the Design Center, certainly a big advantage for IBM. Like Sony’s Kutaragi, Akrout was a visionary, willing to take significant business risks. He was a breath of fresh air in the executive ranks, very unassuming and approachable, always focused on doing the “right thing” for IBM. I was generally unimpressed with IBM’s new executive management chain, but Akrout was different. He had the perfect mixture of technical ability and people skills.

Other than the one phone call he took from his wife, Akrout gave me his complete and undivided attention during the afternoon. It didn’t seem to be special treatment, either; I think he treated anyone who came to his office with the same focused attention. When he listened, he listened with everything in him. His positive energy raised the bar on any conversation.

As I left Akrout’s office, I checked the time. The hours had flown by, and I was late to pick up my two sons. I rushed to gather up my laptop, and then zoomed out of the building.

I raced south down Mopac Highway toward my sons’ school, but Austin’s daily traffic snarl brought me to an abrupt halt. Taillights lined the highway as far as I could see. While I crept along, my thoughts turned to the enormous task that lay ahead of us. Akrout was unmatched in charisma and optimism, but could he convince this team, one not even completely formed yet, that they could be successful where no others had been? Would this kind and jovial man be strong enough to lock horns with Sony and Toshiba when tough calls landed on the doorstep, as they undoubtedly would? And what about the executive team above? Akrout had a grand vision for the future of this product within IBM, but I knew it would be a hard sell to the server-centric, conservative decision makers above us. Those powerful executives remained focused on the IBM server and mainframe computer systems that claimed the highest revenue. They were not interested in the emerging low-end computer space belonging to the PC and the game machine. I smiled. Worried or not, I liked this kind of challenge. I looked forward to being on Akrout’s team and to being IBM’s rebellious stepchild once again.

I looked at the bumper-to-bumper cars around me. A huge number of those drivers were involved in one way or another in Austin’s booming high-tech industry. IBM, Motorola, Dell, Sun, AMD, Applied Materials, Samsung, Solectron, National Instruments, 3M, and a host of smaller businesses called Austin home. With the momentum of all these high-tech companies, Austin was becoming a smaller version of the oft-publicized “Silicon Valley” in California. We called our town “Silicon Hills.” Big things were happening in computer chips all over and Austin was right in the thick of the action. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, or maybe a chicken-and-egg scenario. Did the high-tech companies come to Austin because of low tax and economic considerations found in Texas, and then the engineers followed? Or did the growing pool of engineers draw the companies here by offering the necessary resources for corporate or project growth? With the prestigious University of Texas here, a steady stream of new graduates were readily available to infuse fresh ideas and new learning into the creative process.

Computer chips were an integral part of nearly every facet of life in the civilized world, from home appliances to automobiles, cell phones to soda machines, TVs to pacemakers. Technological advances arrived at hypersonic speed, making most electronic devices obsolete within just a couple of years. Demand for the latest and greatest digital gadget was unprecedented. Austin was a high-tech oasis, ideally positioned to take advantage of the new markets spawned by the widespread use of the Internet. I joined the throngs in the enormous turnover in the Austin workforce as engineers moved from one startup company to the other in search of a rocket ride to riches via an initial product offering. The dot-com explosion was on the decline, and those same engineers were now looking for more stable employment.

The line of cars crawled past the exits for the University of Texas and then downtown and its famous Sixth Street. We rolled across the Town Lake Bridge. It was still hard for me to believe I was working for IBM again, and under heavy veils of secrecy, helping create the PlayStation 3 Cell processor. I had one goal: create a world-class, leading-edge processor chip and deliver it in time for a Christmas 2005 product launch.

Not since the invention of the PC more than twenty years ago had chip engineers been asked to start a design of this magnitude from scratch. Truth be told, this was the mouth-watering opportunity that enticed me to return to Big Blue. Chip designers seldom get to start with a clean sheet of paper, primarily because the PC and server markets demand absolute backward compatibility with previous generations of hardware and software. Heaven help us all if the new version of Microsoft Word doesn’t open old Word files. It’s even more vital in applications that are more sophisticated. Given the high cost of a skilled workforce, lengthy time to market cycles, increasing design complexity, and the exorbitant cost of specialized design tools, we always had plenty of incentive to lean on previous designs. A clean sheet of paper excited every engineer who grew weary of working on derivatives and spin-offs from someone else’s design. It was our chance to create. Success could bring a paradigm shift in home computing.

Thoughts of fame and glory danced in my head, and I felt pretty good by the time I pulled up in front of my sons’ school. With Kutaragi’s grand vision as inspiration, Akrout, Kahle, and I were about to set out to design the Holy Grail of computing: the highest frequency, highest performing microprocessor in the industry—better than anything any PC had ever offered. We were going to make a supercomputer on a single chip.

If we could pull it off, a whole generation of gamers worldwide would pay us tribute, with their bloody digital broadswords raised on high.