Standing on Solid Ground

.......Welcome to the first issue of IEEE Micro for 2007! It’s an honor and a privilege to serve the Micro community as the new Editor in Chief. When I first subscribed to Micro—as a design engineer in the computer industry, perhaps 20 years ago—I remember thumbing through the current issue as soon as it arrived in the mail to see which articles most piqued my interest. Fast-forward to today, and things are pretty much the same: I still subscribe to the paper edition, and much to the dismay of my wife and kids, I eagerly grab it out of the mail pile when it arrives! (Yes, I know, I need to get a life.) So when the opportunity arose to be considered successor to Pradip Bose as Micro EIC, I jumped at the thought of leading what I have long considered the best periodical combining leading microprocessor research with real industry designs. My enthusiasm abated when the reality of attempting to fill Pradip’s rather large shoes set in. I’ve known Pradip for about 10 years now, and he has been very supportive of my career and those of many others in our field. He is truly a giant in the microarchitecture community (although in his quiet humility he would scoff at such an assertion). He has coauthored many highly cited papers (in recent years, seminal papers in powerand reliability-aware microarchitecture) and has tirelessly served the computer architecture community in many capacities, despite a hectic schedule as a manager at IBM Watson. I realized that Pradip’s inspirational leadership as EIC of Micro would be very difficult to match given his many accomplishments. A few examples: He instituted the highly popular Top Picks issue; he infused new blood into the Editorial Board; he sponsored IEEE Micro Best Paper Awards at top conferences; he established an Advisory Board comprising industry and academic leaders in the microarchitecture community; he engaged both boards in setting a more focused direction for Micro; and he worked behind the scenes to rightfully defend Micro as a highly relevant magazine for a vitally important IEEE Computer Society constituency. The entire Micro community should flood Pradip’s inbox (many have already done so) with thanks for all he has done for this vital IEEE CS periodical. (Thankfully, we can continue to count on Pradip’s leadership, owing to his gracious acceptance of my invitation to join the Micro Advisory Board.) Ultimately, I realized that given all that Pradip accomplished as Micro EIC, I could not ask for more solid ground to stand on in undertaking the challenge of my first EIC position. Indeed, one of the greatest advantages of following Pradip as EIC is that much of the planning for 2007 is already done! We are currently putting the finishing touches on the March/April Hot Chips issue, which, as in past years, will contain full-length technical articles from presentations made at the Hot Chips conference. The May/June theme is Hot Tutorials—another brainchild of Pradip’s, based on input from the Advisory Board; the issue will feature tutorial-style articles covering a variety of timely topics. Following a general-interest issue in July/August, we are planning an exciting September/ October special issue on Interconnects for Multicore Chips, coedited by LiShiuan Peh of Princeton and Partha Kundu of Intel. I encourage academic and industry groups working in this critical research area to read the Call for Papers in this issue and to submit an article on their work. With Pradip’s many accomplishments to build on, outstanding Advisory and Editorial boards in place, a dedicated Micro staff, and no shortage of interesting microarchitecture research and microprocessor chip designs to showcase, Micro is well positioned for the future. I am personally very bullish on the microarchitecture landscape that lies ahead of our community. The field is ripe for innovation as Moore’s Law continues to deliver new opportunities, yet significant challenges. The strong industry push towards ‘‘many-core’’ microprocessors with tens, and perhaps hundreds, of processor cores on a die has led to a resurgence in multiprocessor systems research (but with the significant difference that the cores and much of the memory hierarchy are integrated in EIC’s Message