Gene Myron Amdahl

The competitive chip market owes its start to Dr. Gene Amdahl, founder of the first successful IBM-compatible CPU manufacturer, Amdahl Corp. It developed the world's first large-scale-integration (LSI) chips—high-performance, air-cooled units that replaced the water-cooled CPUs. Ten years later, Amdahl tried to produce fault-tolerant wafer-scale chips and a high-performance CPU in another company, Trilogy Systems, but cost become an issue. Subsequently, the pioneer in mainframe computer architectures founded Andor International to design, manufacture, and market unique IBM-compatible products that would improve the efficiency, performance, access, capacity, and protection of programs and data. Another Amdahl business, Commercial Data Services, puts the power and functionality of traditional mainframes into PCs. Amdahl is also known for Amdahl's Law used in parallel programming. Amdahl started his career at IBM, where he originated the pioneering concept of compatibility between computer systems. There he also worked on simulation studies and machine designs for character recognition, and he was the initial planner for the IBM 709 and 7030.