Mark Horowitz and His Impact on Computer Architecture: His Work in Energy Efficiency and Parallel Multiprocessing

In the early 1990s, computer architecture research, both academic and industrial, was flush with "big" problems worthy of attack. Designers were translating workloads from minicomputers to the microprocessor, and so many classic performance problems were still paramount: systems designers were pushing on instruction-level parallelism using reorder buffers and speculation, multilevel branch prediction, and of course multiscalar machines. They were also working to tear down the memory wall, leveraging inclusion as a key cache design concept, and extending caches to hold both eject and inject data.