Come On Charlie Brown, Just Kick the Football

Love the "Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown" quote by Nathan Brookwood in CNET about the Dell / AMD relationship. It always seems so close, and then it slips away. Intel always holds the relationship.

Nathan may be right in saying last year it came the closest ever because of Intel's slips in so many areas. But instead of running with the ball, AMD fumbled by assuming they could rely solely on their 64-bit advantage for the sale. That isn't enough I was told. One exec who's negotiated agreements with Intel and AMD and companies like Dell told me that AMD needs to get "the whiphand" on Intel in some way to get the Dell close. AMD doesn't have that whiphand. And I know why. It came up chatting with an editor who wanted to know the background on Intel's preannounced new product. You see, he knew I'd been there, so he wanted the story again. So here it is...

Back in 1997, when I filed a preliminary patent on just such an approach, I had an interesting meeting with Intel's processor side. We called the technique ROSE then (see A ROSE is a ROSE - Reordering Segment Engine) as part of the Network Accelerator (see TCP/IP network accelerator system and method which identifies classes of packet traffic for predictable protocols). It was the first in a series of parallel processing refinements, which dealt with the layer 2-7 issues of TCP/IP (the discussion was under NDA). It is now called SiliconTCP (see What is Silicon TCP "really"?.

The ultimate low-cost solution was to build it into the southbridge. For high-end apps (going at a faster rate then the bus), you'd put it in the processor / memory interface itself. We even had a hardware socket interface. But in the meantime, as a first step, we could build Network Accelerator cards using SiliconTCP called EtherSAN to move the market, just as the graphics accelerator cards changed the face of the graphics industry. So that's what we built.

That same year, Dr. Cerf (co-creator of TCP/IP) joined the Board of Directors of InterProphet, a funded company which completed the patent filing based on a working prototype of the Network Accelator (patent granted 2001). He joined because we'd solved the Internet TCP bottleneck problem that everyone said "couldn't be solved". Interestingly enough, companies like Alacritech formed after our company was formed, and reference us in their early patents as well. However, their TOE designs are not as efficient (high-cost) nor scalable as ours, and I suppose filing first does help to keep the wolves outside the door.

We met with a VP at AMD as well in 1998, arranged by a USVP VC who had an investment interest in InterProphet. But AMD couldn't get why Vint said this was important. They didn't see the strategic value like Intel did. And they like to lead - not follow.

We received the first patents in this area. Unlike other attempts to simply turn the stack code into Verilog (e.g. Iready and others), we did a completely novel state machine implementation. It is an entirely scalable dedicated stream-oriented protocol processing mechanism. Everyone admitted we'd done it. We even on the $1M dollars funded not only did the prototype but also did a product and demo'd it to every major player in Silicon Valley (1998-1999). There have been more patents since, based on this technology, as well as papers and other work, so work continues.

But at that time, stack latency wasn't considered as big a deal - big enterprise datacenter solutions with high-cost staff and technicians and big servers was still the norm. A low-cost, low-power chip wasn't considered important, as margins were so high and "would always be there". Then came the dot-com bust, outsourcing, and the implosion of the enterprise market. It was all over.

But Dr. Cerf even then spoke of the time when we'd see millions of Internet gadgets on the Internet, and doing older TOE or processor-intensive enterprise solutions would not be viable anymore. After all, how would we be able to power / control / manage 100 million transistor processors, each one embedded in a low-power sensor net? Or in your dress shirt for that matter?

What's the upshot? This same exec last week said that AMD always screws up on getting the whiphand on Intel - not to win against them, but to make the sale to their exclusives. I'm just an inventor - not a saleswoman - but I think he's on to something from what I saw at AMD back then.

Do you think they'll ever learn the lesson and grab the football before Lucy does?