Robert P. "Bob" Colwell (born 1954) is an electrical engineer who worked at

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

and later served as Director of the

Microsystems Technology Office The Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) is one of seven current organizational divisions of DARPA, an government agency, agency responsible for the development of new technology for the United States Armed Forces. It is sometimes referred to as the ...

(MTO) at

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

. He was the chief

IA-32 IA-32 (short for "Intel Architecture, 32-bit", commonly called i386) is the 32-bit version of the x86 instruction set architecture, designed by Intel and first implemented in the 80386 microprocessor in 1985. IA-32 is the first incarnation of ...

architect on the

Pentium Pro The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel and introduced on November 1, 1995. It introduced the P6 microarchitecture (sometimes termed i686) and was originally intended to replace the original P ...

Pentium II The Pentium II brand refers to Intel's sixth-generation microarchitecture (" P6") and x86-compatible microprocessors introduced on May 7, 1997. Containing 7.5 million transistors (27.4 million in the case of the mobile Dixon with 256 KB ...

Pentium III The Pentium III (marketed as Intel Pentium III Processor, informally PIII or P3) brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile CPUs based on the sixth-generation P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 28, 1999. The brand's initial p ...

, and

Pentium 4 Pentium 4 is a series of single-core CPUs for desktops, laptops and entry-level servers manufactured by Intel. The processors were shipped from November 20, 2000 until August 8, 2008. The production of Netburst processors was active from 2000 ...

microprocessors. Bob retired from Intel in 2000. He was an Intel Fellow from 1995 to 2000.

Early life and education

Colwell grew up in a small blue collar town in

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

and was born into a family of six children. His father was a milkman for 35 years. He attended the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the universit ...

and gained an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering. He later attended

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

to get a PhD in Electrical Engineering.

Career

Colwell worked at a company called

Multiflow {{no references, date=June 2019 Multiflow Computer, Inc., founded in April, 1984 near New Haven, Connecticut, USA, was a manufacturer and seller of minisupercomputer hardware and software embodying the VLIW design style. Multiflow, incorporated in ...

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 II, and Pentium III microprocessors, and designs derived from it are used in the

Pentium M The Pentium M is a family of mobile 32-bit single-core x86 microprocessors (with the modified Intel P6 microarchitecture) introduced in March 2003 and forming a part of the Intel Carmel notebook platform under the then new Centrino brand. The '' ...

, Core Duo and Core Solo, and

Core 2 Intel Core 2 is the processor family encompassing a range of Intel's consumer 64-bit x86-64 single-, dual-, and quad-core microprocessors based on the Core microarchitecture. The single- and dual-core models are single- die, whereas the quad-cor ...

microprocessors sold by Intel.

Memberships and awards

Colwell earned the ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award in 2005, and wrote the "At Random" column for ''

Computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

'', a journal published by the

IEEE Computer Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operati ...

Publications

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'', . Colwell has spoken at universities on the challenges in chip design and management principles needed to tackle them.

Personal life

Colwell met his wife in college and he married in 1979. He has three children.

External links

List of publications

Internet stream of Stanford Talk, February 18, 2004 (ASF)
*
Bob Colwell's talk at GCC

Bio page at DARPA MTO
{{DEFAULTSORT:Colwell, Bob Computer designers 1954 births Living people Swanson School of Engineering alumni Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering alumni