William Michael Johnson is a technologist, and pioneer in

superscalar A superscalar processor is a CPU that implements a form of parallelism called instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. In contrast to a scalar processor, which can execute at most one single instruction per clock cycle, a sup ...

microprocessor design in the United States. Johnson holds bachelor's and master's degrees in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

, both from

Arizona State University Arizona State University (Arizona State or ASU) is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the ...

. Johnson was an architect and designer of early reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors at IBM known as ROMP, in Austin, Texas. Johnson joined Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in 1985 as the chief architect of the AMD Am29000 family (commonly known as "29K") of microprocessors. He graduated with a Ph.D. in

from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1989, working with Professor Mark Horowitz. He held various management and leadership positions on the AMD K5 and K7 processor teams. He was vice president of the Advanced Architecture Labs, responsible for technology development in the areas of processor, multimedia, networking, telecommunications, and personal computer system products. He was vice president of the AMD Personal Connectivity Solutions Group in 2002. By 2004 he was a senior AMD fellow. Later he headed Texas Instruments' Austin Microprocessor Design Center. He helped organize a 2005 conference on revitalizing computer architecture research. He served on the electrical engineering advisory council for Arizona State. Johnson wrote a seminal book on microprocessor

superscalar architecture A superscalar processor is a CPU that implements a form of parallelism called instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. In contrast to a scalar processor, which can execute at most one single instruction per clock cycle, a su ...

in 1991. The first book on the subject, it was an expanded version of his dissertation, and included an appendix on applying the techniques to the

Intel Corporation Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series ...

x86 architecture. He was quoted as saying: "The x86 really isn’t all that complex—it just doesn’t make a lot of sense."

Selected works

* Mike Johnson, ''Superscalar Microprocessor Design'', Prentice-Hall, 1991, * Technical Report No. CSL-TR-89-383 * * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Johnson, Mike Stanford University alumni American computer scientists Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering alumni