Link to CALCM Home  

Power: The Next Frontier

February 7, 2002 Thursday
Hamerschlag Hall 1112
2:30 p.m.



Ronny Ronen

Microarchitecture Research, Intel Lab

In the past decades the world of computers has witnessed phenomenal advances. Computers have exhibited ever-increasing performance and decreasing costs, making them more affordable, and in turn, accelerating additional software and hardware development that fueled this trend even more. While the pace of this progress has been quite impressive over the last two decades, it is becoming harder and harder to maintain it. Microarchitecture is now exposed to a new set of challenges and has to consider and explicitly manage the limits of semiconductor technology - such as power dissipation, wire delays, and soft errors. This talk addresses the power challenge. The talk starts at looking at the historical power trends and explaining why continuing "business as usual" will bring the power consumption and the power density to unmanageable levels. The talk later explains how microarchitecture affects power and energy and will demonstrate recent strategies and tactics to achieve more power-efficient microprocessors.


Ronny Ronen is the manager of the Microarchitecture Research Lab of MRL in the Intel Israel Design Center. The research group focuses on promoting microarchitecture innovations to improve performance and reduce power of future Intel IA32 generations. Past research in the group focused on microarchitecture innovations for high performance and included topics like ILP improvements, enhanced instruction caching structures, and more.
Prior to his microarchitecture activities, Ronny led the PentiumŪ Processor compiler and performance simulation activities in the Intel Israel Software department (in Haifa). Before that he was involved in various software projects, most notably the development of software development tools for the 8051 microcontroller, leading the hosting of Intel tools on the VAX/VMS environment, leading the iRMX-286 R2.0 OS development, and leading the development of i860 software development tools.
Ronny received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1978 and 1979 respectively. Ronny holds five patents and has published five papers. Ronny is an Intel Principal Engineer and a senior member of the IEEE.

 

 

Department of Electrical and Computer EngineeringCarnegie Mellon UniversitySchool of Computer Science