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, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

and later served as Director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) at DARPA. 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 i386, 80386 microprocessor in 1985. IA-32 is the first incarn ...

architect on the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Pentium 4 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, officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a U.S. state, state spanning the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern United States, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes region, Great Lakes regions o ...

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 Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

and gained an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering. He later attended Carnegie Mellon University to get a PhD in Electrical Engineering.

Career

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 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.

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 Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

'', a journal published by the IEEE Computer Society.

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