Ho John Lee’s Weblog

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.

I caught a couple of the sessions at the SD Forum Web Based Architecture event yesterday. Adam Denning (Senior Director of the Architecture Strategy Team, Microsoft) prefaced his talk by noting the grand titles that software architects often end up with, and the often fuzzy and open-ended nature of the territory.

I liked this take on the role of the software architect, from someone in the audience, which I think was Pat Helland from Amazon:

Q: What’s the job of a software architect?
A: “Make stuff up and sucker people into building it!”

Someone else in the audience observed that unlike physical world architects, software architects are often involved in actually implementing their designs.

Andre Stechert, Kevin Burton, Alok Bhanot, and Colin Johnson had a panel session after lunch. Andre thinks of software architecture as “the parts of the product that are hard to change”.