AMD Low-Power Guru Addresses the Looming Electronics Power Challenge

Starting his engineering education by taking classes at Caltech under Carver Mead, one of “one of the luminaries of computer VLSI design,” Sam Naffziger “really got excited about the VLSI design field” early in his career. That excitement hasn’t waned a bit as he continues to tackle important challenges in low-power circuit and system design. 

Low-power design techniques like boost and adaptive clocking were brand new in the early 2000s, and not much interest to teams focused almost solely on performance. So, Sam had to sneak some of those low-power features into early designs:

There was another engineer who had a little tiny little microcontroller for other functions to manage the I/O interfaces, and so I managed to get a backdoor path into that microcontroller and some code space so we could actually sneak in, so that the design leads didn't actually know we had this back door.

And the rest, as the saying goes, is history:

So we got this stuff in there, and it proves so valuable…that suddenly it became an essential element for all future processors.

So valuable that it is now used in everything from smartphones to desktop PCs and the latest supercomputers.

Naffziger has had such a fascinating career in the integrated circuit world that you will not want to miss a minute of this Moore’s Lobby interview with our host Daniel Bogdanoff. Some of the other great topics in this episode are:

-Early developments of in-order and out-of-order computer architectures

-Why AMD pays attention to the overclocking community

-Is performance per watt more important than raw performance? 

-Sam’s key role in one of the most famous Caltech pranks of all time!