> you may have heard of techniques such as carry lookahead, Kogge-Stone addition
Just an aside, that is Peter Kogge, who did his PhD work at Stanford, worked on the space shuttle, is an IBM fellow, and invented the first multi-core cpu.
The man clearly has many deserved achievements to his name, but that is true without this, and I'm confident the world would be better without this kind of statement.
"A multi-core CPU" isn't much of an invention per se. It's an idea -- one that is fairly obvious and trivial at a certain point of semiconductor history. Getting a multi-core CPU to run is not trivial, but it's not a single invention either, and by the time we got there, development teams were so large that it would be downright insulting to claim that one person solved all these problems by himself. Perhaps Kogge led the development of the first multi-core CPU, perhaps he was even visionary in the sense that he pushed for it before others thought it was feasible (I do not know if that is the case). But either way, he didn't invent it.
Thank you for keeping me honest, I concede the point; I was quoting from his Wikipedia entry and wasn’t particularly critical because I took an architecture class from him in grad school and liked him as a professor.
This raises my general curiosity to ask myself: among the set of things that could be said to have been truly invented by a single person (or pair/trio/tiny team) ... which inventions are the most complex ... and which are the most technologically advanced?
(In this scene, Steve Martin’s character Vinnie is trying to get away from Rick Moranis’s character Barney, and he gets a bunch of actors to pretend to be his family (none of whom speak English) to play on the latter’s sympathy and ask to have his handcuffs removed. Vinnie introduces Barney as, among other things, the inventor of the rotary engine, causing one of the actresses to break character and say “I thought Wankel invented the rotary engine”.)
As a double-aside, Peter Kogge wrote a very good early textbook on pipelined microarchitectures that's worth reading if you want to learn how early supercomputer vector processors were designed: The Architecture of Pipelined Computers (1981).
Peter used to consult/collaborate with my lab. He was a proponent of moving remote sensing computations closer to the sensor ("edge computing" these days).
You could definitely make the intellectual case for this approach. In cases where there's latency or costs associated with moving data to central computing, this makes sense. (In our case, it was space-based sensors so you could make the case that way.)
But AFAIK this style of processing was never systematically adopted in any space-based processing system, although many such systems (like radars) have ad hoc data reductions performed in hardware close to the sensor.
Just an aside, that is Peter Kogge, who did his PhD work at Stanford, worked on the space shuttle, is an IBM fellow, and invented the first multi-core cpu.