James A. Kahle

Who is James A. Kahle?

Jim Kahle is an IBM Fellow and Chief Architect and Director of Technology at the center for Cell Technology in Austin, Texas.

Mr. Kahle was born in Venezuela where his father worked in the oil business. He received his B.S. degree from Rice University in 1983. He has been working for IBM since the early 1980s on RISC-based microprocessors. His work started in physical design tools and is currently concentrated on RISC architecture. With over 20 years of experience of chip design, and about 160 patents, he has been key to defining the Power Architecture and the superscalar microprocessor designs at IBM. He has been on the forefront of developing multicore designs, asymmetric multiprocessors and SMT microarchitectures. He was the key designer for the RIOS processor that launched the RS/6000 family of workstations and servers and one of the founders of the Somerset Design Center, birthplace of the PowerPC architecture, where he was the project manager for the PowerPC 603 and subsequent designs like the PowerPC 750. He was also chief architect for the POWER4 core.