Dr. Robert (Bob) P. Colwell

An electrical engineer, he worked at Intel Corporation and was former Director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) at DARPA, an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. The inventor or co-inventor on over 40 patents, he was the chief IA-32 architect on the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Pentium 4 microprocessors. He was an Intel Fellow from 1995 to 2000. Born into a family of six children, he grew up in a small blue-collar town in Pennsylvania. His father was a milkman for 35 years and his parents worked hard to provide for their children. He attended the University of Pittsburgh, graduating with a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1980. He then attended Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; receiving his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1985. His Ph.D. work demonstrated the theoretical superiority of CISC architectures over RISC. He met his wife while in college and they married in 1979. They have three children. He worked at a company called Multiflow Computer, Inc. from 1985-1990 as a Design Engineer. Multiflow was a manufacturer and seller of minisupercomputer hardware and software embodying the VLIW design style. Multiflow, incorporated in Delaware, ended operations in March, 1990, after selling about 125 VLIW minisupercomputers in the United States, Europe and Japan. When Multiflow closed, he joined Intel Corporation in Hillsboro Oregon, as a Senior Architect where he was involved in the development of the P6 "core". The P6 core was used in the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and Pentium III microprocessors, and designs derived from it are used in the Pentium M, Core Duo and Core Solo, and Core 2 microprocessors sold by Intel. He retired from Intel in 2001 and has since been a columnist and a consultant on legal and patent issues. He earned the ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award in 2005 (the highest honor in the field of computer architecture) for, "outstanding achievements in the design and implementation of industry-changing microarchitectures, and for significant contributions to the RISC/CISC architecture debate." From 2002 to 2005, he wrote the "At Random" column for Computer, a journal published by the IEEE Computer Society. He is the author of several papers in addition to the book, ?The Pentium Chronicles: The People, Passion, and Politics Behind Intel's Landmark Chips?, ISBN 0-471-73617-1. He has spoken at universities on the challenges in chip design and management principles needed to tackle them. He has participated in numerous panel sessions and invited talks.