Uri Weiser did pioneering industry and academic work in high performance processors and multimedia architectures. In a nearly 40-year career that has included roles in government, industry and academia, Weiser has made seminal contributions, including defining the first Intel Pentium processor architecture and being a recognized leader in asymmetric and heterogeneous manycore architecture.
In the late 1980s, Weiser was an engineer with Intel’s Design Architecture Group. At the time, Intel was using a Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) design for its X86 microprocessors. A debate emerged within the computing field as to whether Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) design would eclipse the CISC design. Intel was contemplating whether to continue to manufacture its X86 processors using the CISC design or abandon the program and repurpose the company to design its microprocessors using RISC-based architecture.
Weiser single-handedly convinced Intel executives to continue with the CISC-based X86 processors by showing that through adding new features such as superscalar execution, branch predication and more, the X86 processors could perform competitively against the RISC family of processors. Wieser’s architectural enhancements laid the foundation for the Intel Pentium processor.
The ACM/IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award is known as the computer architecture community’s most prestigious award. Weiser will receive the 2016 Eckert-Mauchly Award at the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) to be held June 18 to 22 in Seoul, Korea.
