Times Are A’Changing Again

Times Are A’Changing Again

BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY
Rice News Staff
May 27, 1999

The next decade will see continued rapid change in the computer industry and
architecture, a move to customized, embedded chips and more automation of computer
architecture, one of Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) top computer scientists told a Rice
audience.

B. Ramakrishna (Bob) Rau, a senior research scientist at Hewlett-Packard Labs
in Palo Alto, Calif., presented the fifth annual William E. (Gene) Brice Colloquium
on April 29 in Anne and Charles Duncan Hall on behalf of the Electrical and
Computer Engineering Department. Rau’s talk was titled "The Automation
of Computer Architecture: Yet Another Consequence of Moore’s Law."

Rau holds the title of Hewlett-Packard laboratories scientist, the company’s
highest technical position. He heads up HP labs’ compiler and architecture research
group, which performs long-range research for products that are from five to
10 years into the future. He is a consulting professor at Stanford University,
where he earned a doctorate in electrical engineering. He has 13 patents and
numerous research publications on VLIW and high-performance computing and has
co-edited a book on instruction-level parallel processing.

Rau opened his lecture by saying that Moore’s Law will continue to hold sway
over the computer industry. Moore’s Law states that computer speed will increase
and size will diminish by a factor of two every 18 to 24 months.

Rau said Moore’s Law forces change, allows researchers to predict change and
is leading to the computer industry’s next big thing, which is the "invisible
computer."

Most people who want personal computers have bought them, he said. The next
step is invisible computing where chips are embedded in all kinds of smart products.
The process is already starting to happen in products such as automobiles and
cellular phones.

That next big step will require higher performance computing at lower cost
and higher volume. Computer architects will eventually be expected to design
custom processors with "no fluff," he said.

"You can design something that has only one function," he said. "The
number of distinct designs (of chips) will increase sharply."

Those embedded chips will require shorter time-to-market, which will lead to
a greater need for an automated chip design. The current process of designing
a chip may take from two to three years.

At HP, Rau is working on a process called Program In Chip Code Out (PICO).
Rau said using an automated process such as PICO may lead to customized chip
production in four weeks.

"Why not automate the perspiration and leave the inspiration to the humans,"
he said.