- Bob Colwell
Robert P. "Bob" Colwell (born 1954) is an electrical engineer who worked at
Intel and is now an independent consultant. He was the chiefIA-32 architect on thePentium Pro ,Pentium II ,Pentium III , andPentium 4 microprocessors. Bob retired from Intel in 2000. He was an Intel Fellow from 1995 to 2000.Colwell earned the ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award in 2005, and wrote the "At Random" column for "Computer", a journal published by the
IEEE Computer Society .Colwell 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.
Besides being a prolific computer architect, Colwell is known to be a very charismatic speaker and is extremely respected as an engineer both inside and outside Intel. He has spoken at universities on the numerous challenges in chip design and management principles needed to tackle them. He authors a column on the ACM magazine called "Spectrum".
Colwell grew up in a small blue collar town in
Pennsylvania and was born into a family of six kids. His father was a milkman for 35 years and his parents worked hard to provide for their children. Colwell was raised with strong family values and an emphasis on education. He attended the University of Pittsburgh to get an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering. He later attendedCarnegie Mellon University to get a PhD in Electrical Engineering. Colwell worked at a company called Multiflow in the late 1980s as a design engineer. In 1990 he joined Intel as a senior architect and was involved in the development of the P6 "core". The P6 core was used in the Pentium Pro, Pentium-2, Pentium-3, Pentium-M, Core Duo and Core 2 Duo microprocessors sold by Intel.Colwell is a devout family man, and is married to the same woman he met in college. As of 2006, he was married to her for 28 years. He has 3 children.
Colwell's middle class upbringing and his prolific achievements have made him a towering icon in the computer industry.
External links
* [http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/c/Colwell:Robert_P=.html List of publications]
* [http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/040218-ee380-100.asx Internet stream of Stanford Talk, February 18, 2004 (ASF)]
* [http://www.umc.pitt.edu/pittmag/sept2001/chips.html Article at the University of Pittsburgh]
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