Joel Emer

Joel S. Emer (born March 2, 1954) is a pioneer in computer performance analysis techniques and a microprocessor architect. He is currently a researcher at Nvidia, and a Professor of the Practice at MIT, and was formerly an Intel Fellow. which was published in 1984 in the 11th International Symposium on Computer Architecture. That paper also contained the result that the VAX-11/780's performance was actually 0.5 MIPS instead of 1 MIPS as was previously claimed by DEC. That result helped popularize what Clark called the iron law of processor performance that related cycles per instruction (CPI), frequency and number of instructions to computer performance.

Emer has also contributed to simultaneous multithreading (SMT), memory dependence prediction via store sets, and soft error analysis, and led the development of the Asim simulator.

He was the 2009 recipient of the Eckert–Mauchly Award, for lifetime contributions in computer architecture.