The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 1)
Check other articles in the series...I write this series with great pleasure, as my former graduate school advisor and renowned MIT professor Anant Agarwal unveils his so far stealth-mode company Tilera this week. Tilera could well be the next big breakthrough in processor design.
SM: Anant, please give us some background on where you come from. AA: Growing up, I wanted to be an engineer. I went to school in Mangalore and took the IIT entrance test. I did not have a lot of hope of getting in, and was surprised when it happened. At that time I was working on speech systems. I had been part of a team which built a speech recognition system for Hindi. Then I came to Stanford to work on speech and linear systems theory. Somewhere along the way I switched into computer architecture and began working with John Hennessey, and worked with him on the first MIPS computer. That was 1983.
SM: What was going on in the processor landscape at the time? AA: At that time, the big debate was the RISC versus CISC debate.
SM: You moved to MIT after your PhD? AA: Right. After my PhD, in 1987 I moved to MIT to be a professor, and have been teaching there for two decades now. The first thing we did there, was a project called Sparcle which was to build a multi-threaded processor. We demonstrated the chip in 1992. It was a SPAR
C based multithreaded chip in the early 1990s. This was a collaborative effort of MIT, Sun Microsystems, and LSI Logic. Brad Howard and others supported it from LSI, and Dave Ditzel from Sun Microsystems. We built the chip and demonstrated a working multi threaded chip.
This segment is part 1 in a 15 part series Segment 2 →
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