Title: Microprocessor War Stories

Abstract:
The 1990's were computer engineering's equivalent of extreme sports, an amazing time to be designing silicon for the PC industry. When we started the P6 microprocessor design at Intel in 1990, networked PC's were oddities, DOS was king, Unix workstations could trade email if you told them exactly how to route it, and servers were those great big boxes that IBM sold. By decade's end the internet had erupted, and virtually all of those P6-based microprocessors were running workloads related to it in one way or another, workloads that didn't even exist at the time of P6's design. This talk will recount some of the memorable lessons learned while steering 4-year silicon design projects through technical, competitive, and marketing landscapes that change in half that time.

Bio:
Bob Colwell was Chief Architect of Intel's IA32 microprocessors from 1992-2000, and managed the IA32 Arch group in Intel's Hillsboro, Oregon facility. Colwell joined Intel in 1990 as a Senior CPU Architect on the P6 (Pentium Pro) project, and became manager of the Architecture Group two years later. He was named an Intel Fellow in 1996, the highest technical grade at the company. Prior to his work at Intel, Colwell was a CPU architect and hardware designer at VLIW pioneer Multiflow Computer from 1985 until its demise in 1990. Prior to that he worked part time as a hardware design engineer at workstation vendor Perq Systems, while attending graduate school at Carnegie Mellon. He was a member of the technical staff at the Bell Telephone Labs from 1977 to 1980, working on the BellMac series of microprocessors. He has published 16 technical papers and journal articles, is inventor or co-inventor on 40+ patents, and has participated in numerous panel sessions and invited talks. He is currently an independent consultant. Colwell received his BSEE degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1977, and his MSEE and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1978 and 1985.