VLIW Pioneer

HP Labs is featuring an article on Prof. Josh Fisher HP senior fellow and founder of HP Labs Cambridge.

Some inventors trace their career choice to a lifelong passion. HP Senior Fellow Josh Fisher traces his to a single college lecture.

The lecture sparked his interest in computer architecture and then there was no turning back. The term VLIW, and the VLIW architecture concept, was invented by him in his research group at Yale University in the early 1980s.

• VLIW Pioneer: HP Senior Fellow Josh Fisher
• Joseph A. (Josh) Fisher: Biography (A tiny one at that)

Very Long Instruction Word or VLIW CPU architectures implement a form of instruction level parallelism. Similar to superscalar architectures, it uses several execution units (e.g. two multipliers), which enables the CPU to execute several instructions at the same time (e.g. two multiplications).

Since the very earliest days of computer architecture, some CPUs have added several additional arithmetic logic units (ALUs) to run in parallel. Superscalar CPUs use hardware to decide which operations can run in parallel. VLIW CPUs use software (the compiler) to decide which operations can run in parallel.

Very Long Instruction Word at Wikipedia