Call it a hunch, but I’m guessing VMware chief Paul Maritz did not spend the Fourth of July at a barbecue with Intel folks. Video has just emerged of Maritz going to town bashing the x86 architecture while speaking at the Tiecon Conference, which took place in May.
The video runs 10 minutes but doesn’t seem complete. In it, he details the long development process of the x86 architecture, dating back to the 8080 chip, and complains about how as the processor has developed, none of the old gateways were removed, making the x86 a power pig.
His main point was that Intel’s x86 architecture is just not fit for mobile devices. “It’s a power hog, it loves electricity, all those [unused] gates are basically consuming power,” he said. He added that over the years, Intel has added instructions that no one uses and aren’t used, but were never removed.
“It’s all junk silicon,” he added.
Intel’s response was “Paul Maritz is not privy to all of Intel’s product plans.”
The odd thing was that Maritz was discussing mobile devices and the plusses and minuses of ARM vs. x86. His firm does virtualization software for massive server systems. Talk about getting far a-field. What next, Larry Ellison criticizing Blizzard for leaving LAN play out of StarCraft II?
(He may not care but I’m mighty annoyed at Blizzard for that.)