Intel Tukwila suffers from political squabbling

THE STORY of Tukwila is as tangled as Tanglewood was but more tangles face Tukwila according to moles I met at Laguna Beach last week.

We reported here that senior Tukwila architect Mike Pachos, who worked on the Alpha EV7, is leaving Intel to spend more time with his MBA.

An early release of the Tukwila Itanic, as Nova said here, might possibly throw dust in IBM's Power 6 eyes. But that now seems highly unlikely.

The rumble in the jumble is that Tukwila's speed might drop in the system interface section to 2.4GHz - three years ago the Tukwila talk was that this would be 4.5GHz.

Course there is more than one Tukwila and when the original one was canned, not long after Intel bought out HP's Itanic crew, all the ground rules changed with different sets of engineers all forced to collaborate with the bluecoats at Fort Collins.

Said one mole over a cool cocktail: "Sections of the chip were re-divided on political boundaries so quality has been suffering dramatically."

Still, that's only one thing bothering all Intel engineers, whatever their political persuasion. They're worried about persistent rumors of layoffs of engineering staff before the end of August. So far, they're just rumors and fears. µ