William Michael "Mike" Johnson is a technologist, and pioneer in superscalar

Superscalar

A superscalar CPU architecture implements a form of parallelism called instruction level parallelism within a single processor. It therefore allows faster CPU throughput than would otherwise be possible at a given clock rate...

 microprocessor

Microprocessor

A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...

 design in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

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Johnson holds bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering, both from Arizona State University

Arizona State University

Arizona State University is a public research university located in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area of the State of Arizona...

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Johnson was an architect and designer of early reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors at IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

 known as ROMP

ROMP

The ROMP or Research Micro Processor was a 10 MHz RISC microprocessor designed by IBM in the early 1980s manufactured on a 2 µm process with 45,000 transistors....

, in Austin, Texas

Austin, Texas

Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...

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Johnson joined Advanced Micro Devices

Advanced Micro Devices

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. or AMD is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets...

 (AMD) in 1985 as the chief architect of the AMD Am29000

AMD Am29000

The AMD 29000, often simply 29k, was a popular family of 32-bit RISC microprocessors and microcontrollers developed and fabricated by Advanced Micro Devices . They were, for a time, the most popular RISC chips on the market, widely used in laser printers from a variety of manufacturers...

 family (commonly known as "29K") of microprocessors.
He graduated with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering

Electrical engineering

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...

 from Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 in 1989, working with Professor Mark Horowitz

Mark Horowitz

Mark A. Horowitz is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University. He received his BS and MS in electrical engineering from MIT in 1978 and he completed his Ph.D in electrical engineering from Stanford University under the direction of Prof. Robert Dutton in...

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He held various management and leadership positions on the AMD K5

AMD K5

The K5 was AMD's first x86 processor to be developed entirely in-house. Introduced in March 1996, its primary competition was Intel's Pentium microprocessor. The K5 was an ambitious design, closer to a Pentium Pro than a Pentium regarding technical solutions and internal architecture...

 and K7 processor teams. He was vice president of the Advanced Architecture Labs, responsible for technology development in the areas of processor, multimedia, networking, telecommunications, and personal computer system products. He was vice president of the AMD Personal Connectivity Solutions Group in 2002.
By 2004 he was a senior AMD fellow.

Later he headed Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...

' Austin Microprocessor Design Center.
He helped organize a 2005 conference on revitalizing computer architecture research.
He served on the electrical engineering advisory council for Arizona State.

Johnson wrote a seminal book on microprocessor superscalar architecture in 1991. The first book on the subject, it was an expanded version of his dissertation, and included an appendix on applying the techniques to the Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...

 x86 architecture. He was quoted as saying: "The x86 really isn’t all that complex—it just doesn’t make a lot of sense."

Selected works

• Mike Johnson, Superscalar Microprocessor Design, Prentice-Hall, 1991, ISBN 0-13-875634-1 Technical Report No. CSL-TR-89-383