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LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 20 November 2015 - IEEE Computer Society Awards committee selected Dr. Robert Colwell to receive the 2015 B. Ramakrishna Rau Award, "For contributions to critical analysis of microarchitecture and the development of the Pentium Pro processor."
Colwell was Director of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office from 2012–2014. Previously, he was Intel's chief IA32 (Pentium) microprocessor architect from 1992–2000. He was named the Eckert-Mauchly award winner for 2005.
Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006 "for contributions to turning novel computer architecture concepts into viable, cutting-edge commercial processors," he is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science. He was named an Intel Fellow in 1996 and an IEEE Fellow in 2006.
Colwell was a CPU architect at VLIW minisupercomputer pioneer Multiflow Computer, a hardware design engineer at workstation vendor Perq Systems, and a member of technical staff at Bell Labs.
He has published many technical papers and journal articles, is inventor or co-inventor on 40 patents, and has participated in numerous panel sessions and invited talks. He is the Perspectives editor for IEEE Computer Magazine, wrote the At Random column 2002–2005, and is author of The Pentium Chronicles. He is currently an independent consultant. Colwell holds the BSEE degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and the MSEE and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.
A certificate and a $2,000 honorarium are awarded by the Computer Society in recognition of important work related to microarchitectural technology, including both hardware and compller code generation.
The Rau award will be presented at the MICRO-48 Conference on Tuesday, 8 December 2015 in Waikiki, Hawaii.
The B. Ramakrishna Rau Award was established in memory of B. Ramakrishna Rau, and awarded in recognition of his distinguished career in promoting and expanding the use of innovative computer microarchitecture techniques, including his innovation in compiler technology, his leadership in academic and industrial computer architecture, and his extremely high personal and ethical standards.
