#xenithmicroprocessors

[kmxiv-blog]

Surprise!  That’s what’s waiting for us and the Iceberg team.  Some secrets are just badly kept.  After today’s Proof of Concept cancellation, we had decided to put the whole development of the Iceberg phone on ice (no pun intended) and just focus on beating the benchmarks.  After beating the benchmarks, we can get the green light to get back to work on the phone.

So someone must’ve leaked that bit of information even though it’s supposed to be a secret.

The good thing is that news leaks both ways:

After finding out that we planned to “cheat” to beat the benchmarks, that we were building a benchmark-beating machine rather than a phone that performs really well, they decided, in “secret,” to not give us a date for the postponned POC.  It’ll be a surprise, so we should be ready at any moment.

So now we know that we should be expecting a surprise visit for the POC.

This puts us in a difficult position.

The plan was, work on one month of the benchmarks, beat them, then work on the phone.  Now, we don’t know if the POC is in two months, three months or even more.  We cannot split the team into two, benchmark team and phone team, because then we’ll have two phones, one that can only beat benchmarks and one that can’t.  It’ll split our resources and waste it in this benchmark project, which brings nothing to the Iceberg.  If we keep the team as one and the benchmark is in a month, we will not get those numbers, especially as we don’t know what these numbers are.

So what do we do now?  Build a benchmarking machine that can also run Honey&Ice?

I wonder if they intentionally leaked the “surprise visit” so that we know what we’re up against and they want to see how we handle a difficult decision like this.  How we manage our time and resources and how we deal with unknown deadlines, the element of surprise and many volatile, “external” factors.

It’s as if they’re training us or me in particular for the madness of the market.

That’s how I like to see it.  I see right through them.

And they know that.  And they know that I know that they know that I… 

I’m not sure what the correct decision is though.  Make a half-assed phone that benches well, or make the best phone in the world that gets canned because it didn’t meet certain numbers.

[kmxiv-blog]

Xenith Iceberg - Sweet as honey, cool as ice.