Joseph A. (Josh) Fisher
Senior HP Fellow Emeritus
Josh Fisher is an industry pioneer in Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) computing -- a CPU architecture that reads a group of instructions and executes them all at the same time, making for faster processing.
He came to HP in 1990, attracted by the opportunity to work
on the PA-WW (Precision Architecture--Wide-Word) project,
which is heavily based on VLIW and eventually became IA-64.
Fisher did a lot of fundamental research in VLIW architectures,
even coining the terms VLIW and instruction-level parallelism.
Before joining HP, Fisher co-founded and served as president and later
as chief technical officer for Multiflow Computer Inc., which built VLIW
mini-supercomputers. After a significant period of success, Multiflow
folded, but HP and Intel used its technology to design PA-WW.
Fisher also was a computer science professor at Yale University for five
years.
He says he'd like to be remembered for contributing fundamental technology
that allows HP to make better products.
"My style is to push the state of the art while building things that people
actually use," he says. "I want to be able to walk into a store and see
an HP product that I know is better because of what I did. "
Josh retired from HP in 2006.
Areas of research:
Very Long Instruction Word architectures and compiling, custom-fit processors.
Education:
M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science, New York University's Courant Institute.
Honors:
ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award
National Science Foundations's 1984 President's Young Investigator Award. |
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