John Crawford (engineer)

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John Crawford 2011

John H. Crawford (b. 1953) is an American computer engineer.

Crawford studied computer science at Brown University with a bachelor's degree in 1975 and at the University of North Carolina with a master's degree in 1977. He studied there with Frederick P. Brooks, among others . While still a student he developed in 1977 at Intel software for the Intel 8086 processor, including a Pascal - Compiler . After graduating, he went to Intel in 1977, where he worked on compilers until 1982 and in 1982 became the main architect of the Intel 80386 line, the 32-bit extension of the previous 8086 to 80286 line of 16-bit processors. He was also the main architect of the Intel 80486 and was co-manager on the Intel Pentium draft, which came out in 1993. He then led the joint project between Intel and Hewlett-Packard for the Itanium architecture of a 64-bit processor.

The development of the 80386 brought Intel out of a critical phase. The predecessor 80286 disappointed the software developers and fell behind the main competitor Motorola 68000 . Crawford himself wrote almost a third of the microcode for the 80386. In the development of the successor, Crawford mainly delegated, concentrated on the overall organization and gave his teams freedom.

Crawford led a team of over 100 engineers for the design of the Pentium, relying on an empirical approach and testing extensively in simulation programs which instructions were used how often and which led to bottlenecks and optimized the processor accordingly. As a result, the processor was able to keep a head start at the time, although the CISC method used was considered out of date in comparison to RISC-type processor architectures. RISC-like architectures were used at Intel starting with the Pentium Pro, with the highlights Itanium and Pentium 4, which both disappointed, which is why hybrid architectures were used afterwards.

In the late 2000s he was director of microprocessor architecture at Intel.

In 1995 he received the Eckert-Mauchly Award . In 1997 he received the IEEE Ernst Weber Managerial Leadership Recognition and in 2002 he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering . He has been an Intel Fellow since 1992. In 2014 he became a Fellow of the Computer History Museum .

Fonts

  • with Patrick P. Gelsinger Programming the 80386 , Sybex 1987

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John Markoff: Profile / John Crawford; A Clear, Cool Voice in the Frenzied World of Chip Design, New York Times, July 18, 1993
  2. ^ Biography on the occasion of a lecture in 2008
personal data
SURNAME Crawford, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Crawford, John H.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer engineer
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century