Robert P. "Bob" Colwell was born in 1954. He is an electrical engineer who worked at Intel and later became the director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) at DARPA. He was the lead IA-32 architect for 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 was born in a small blue-collar town in Pennsylvania and grew up in a family of six children. His father worked as a milkman for 35 years. Colwell attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering. He later went to Carnegie Mellon University to earn a PhD in Electrical Engineering.

Career

Colwell worked at a company named Multiflow in the late 1980s as a design engineer. In 1990, he began working at Intel as a senior architect. He helped create the P6 "core," which was a key part of the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and Pentium III microprocessors. Later designs based on the P6 core were used in the Pentium M, Core Duo, Core Solo, and Core 2 microprocessors made by Intel.

Memberships and awards

In 2005, Colwell received the ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award. Colwell also wrote the "At Random" column for Computer, a journal published by the IEEE Computer Society.

Publications

Colwell has written many articles and a book titled The Pentium Chronicles: The People, Passion, and Politics Behind Intel's Landmark Chips, ISBN 0-471-73617-1. Colwell has given talks at universities about the challenges in designing computer chips and the management strategies needed to solve these problems.