If John Hennessy is the grandfather of the RISC architecture, then Joseph Fisher must the grandfather of VLIW.
Joseph Fisher, grandfather of VLIW
Linked below is Fisher’s seminal paper on VLIW from 1983, “Very Long Instruction Word Architectures and the ELI-512“. [1]
ABSTRACT By compiling ordinary scientific applications programs with a radical technique called trace scheduling, we are generating code for a parallel machine that will run these programs faster than an equivalent sequential machine-we expect 10 to 30 times faster.
Wind forward a quarter century to Spring 2009, and Fisher and colleagues Paolo Faraboschi and Cliff Young authored the article “VLIW Processors: From Blue Sky to Best Buy” for IEEE magazine Solid State Circuits: [2]
ABSTRACT Very long instruction word (VLIW) is an architectural style that one of the authors—Josh Fisher—proposed about 30 years ago to speed up computers and otherwise enhance their performance. Those listening to Fisher’s first public “blue-sky” expositions of this technology in the early 1980s did not generally expect it to succeed. Indeed, they would have been stunned to hear of the success these processors are enjoying today, especially as embedded processors, designed to perform special-purpose functions, usually in real time, in some kind of hardware.
[1] http://inst.cs.berkeley.edu/~n252/paper/p263-fisher.pdf
[2] http://sites.google.com/site/paolofaraboschi/vliwbluesky2.pdf
