John Crawford (engineer)

John H. Crawford (c. 1953) is an American computer engineer.

Crawford studied computer science at Brown University with a bachelor's degree in 1975 and at the University of North Carolina with a Master 's degree in 1977., Where he studied, among others, at Frederick P. Brooks. While still a student he developed in 1977 Intel software for the Intel 8086 processor, including a Pascal compiler. He went after graduation in 1977 Intel, where he worked on compilers to 1982 and 1982, the main architect of the Intel 80386 line was, the 32- bit extension of the previous 8086 - up to 80286 line of 16 - bit processors. He was also the chief architect of the Intel 80486 and was co - manager in the Intel Pentium design, which came on the market in 1993. He then headed the joint project of Intel and Hewlett -Packard Itanium architecture of a 64 -bit processor.

The development of the Intel 80386 fetched from a critical phase. The predecessor 80286 disappoint the software developer and fell against the main competitors Motorola 68000 from. Crawford wrote for the 80386 or even almost a third of the microcode. In the development of the successor Crawford delegated mainly focused on the overall organization and let his team spaces.

Crawford led to the design of the Pentium a team of over 100 engineers, where he sat on an empirical approach and extensively tested in simulation programs which instructions were used how often and which led to bottlenecks and processor optimized accordingly. The processor has managed to preserve a lead, although the method used CISC was then compared to RISC -like processor architectures as obsolete by then. RISC -like architectures have been used for Intel from the Pentium Pro, with highlights Itanium, and Pentium 4 but both disappointed, so after hybrid architectures were used.

End of the 2000s he was director of microprocessor architecture at Intel.

In 1995 he received the Eckert - Mauchly Award. In 1997 he received the IEEE Ernst Weber Engineering Leadership Recognition and he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2002. He is since 1992, Intel Fellow. In 2014 he became a Fellow of the Computer History Museum.

Writings

• Patrick P. Gelsinger with Programming the 80386, Sybex 1987