Bob Colwell on being a CPU architect
An excellent guest lecture at Stanford’s EE380 sometime around February 2004 by Bob Colwell, chief architect of Intel’s IA32 microprocessors from 1992-2000. (90 minutes, Windows Media).
On the history of CPUs, chip processes, power and heat dissipation, Itanium IA64 versus IA32, target markets and economies of scale, FDIV, CPUID, lifetimes of architectures, organizational politics, learning to deal with branded consumer market rather than pure technology customers.
Architects must take the long view
Architect’s job is to make valuable products
- not clever microarchitectures or instruction sets
- not “blue crystals” - useless differentiating features
- look for intersection between what technology will be able to do and what buyers will want, then sell that vision to rest of company
This presentation was made a couple of years ago, in the middle of Pentium 4 and the early days of Centrino, Itanium was the path forward, Opteron was under the radar, and power dissipation and mobility were rising in perceived importance compared with higher clock speeds and CPU benchmarks alone.
via The Inquirer
Update 03-08-2006 23:03 PST: Here’s the abstract and speaker bio from Stanford EE380
Tags: intel, cpu, x86, stanford, ia32, ia64, architecture, architect, business, management, history, culture
