Communications of the ACM
Achievement in Microarchitecture
Credit: Fritzchens Fritz / Wikipedia (CC0 1.0 Deed)
David Papworth, recipient of the 2022 ACM Charles P. "Chuck" Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award, accepted a big job in 1990 when he joined Intel's P6 micro-processor team as lead designer. The P6—commercialized as the Pentium Pro—was intended to leapfrog micro-processor design, and it did. Thanks to Papworth's broad understanding of the hardware-software interface and adroit leadership of more than 500 architects, designers, validators, and engineers, the P6 introduced a new micro-architectural paradigm that is still in use today. Here, Papworth recalls how it all went down.
In the 1980s, before joining Intel, you worked at a startup called Multiflow, which pioneered Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture. VLIW exploits instruction-level parallelism by enabling the compiler to schedule pipelines of instructions across different functional units—a technique known as superscalar processing. How did VLIW influence your work on Intel's P6 microprocessor?
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