Mr. James (Jim) A. Kahle

A 2002 IBM Fellow and Chief Architect and Director of Technology at the center for Cell Technology in Austin, Texas being designed for Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. Cell is a multi-core microprocessor microarchitecture that combines a general-purpose Power Architecture core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as many other forms of dedicated computation. Cell was presented the 2004 Microprocessor Report Analysts' Choice Award for the Best Technology. He was born in Venezuela where his father worked in the oil business. He received his B.S. degree from Rice University in 1983. He has been working for IBM since the early 1980s on RISC-based microprocessors. His work started in physical design tools and is currently concentrated on RISC architecture. With over 20 years of experience of chip design, and about 160 patents, he has been key to defining the Power Architecture and the superscalar microprocessor designs at IBM. He has been on the forefront of developing multicore designs, asymmetric multiprocessors and SMT microarchitectures. He was the key designer for the RIOS processor that launched the RS/6000 family of workstations and servers and one of the founders of the Somerset Design Center, birthplace of the PowerPC architecture, where he was the project manager for the PowerPC 603 and subsequent designs like the PowerPC 750. He was also chief architect for the POWER4 core used in IBM servers and Apple's G5. He was the project manager for PowerPC 603 series that are used in Apple Laptops and Nintendo game cubes.