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Integrated-circuit era (1959-1975)
Gene Amdahl
1922-2015
Formulated Amdahl's Law in 1967; attempted wafer-scale integration with Trilogy Systems in 1980.
Contributions
- 01Architect of the IBM 704, 709, and System/360.
- 02Amdahl's Law: speedup is limited by the serial fraction of the workload.
- 03Trilogy raised about $230M to build IBM-compatible mainframes on a single wafer with triplicate gates and laser repair. Failed on yield.
Why it matters for wafer-scale integration
Amdahl's Law explains why we scale out with GPUs instead of building ever-bigger cores. Trilogy's failure is the cautionary tale that Cerebras learned from forty years later.