2003 InfoWorld Innovator: Rich Oehler

It wouldn’t be easy to turn a small chipmaker’s new 64-bit CPU into an enterprise powerhouse, but it’s the kind of challenge Newisys CTO Rich Oehler tackled often during his long tenure at IBM. In 1970, he was part of the Future Systems engineering team whose efforts led to System 38, the most advanced minicomputer of its time. Later, he was one of five members of engineer legend John Cocke’s RISC group, all of whom went on to become IBM Fellows, a lifelong honor reserved for the company’s most brilliant innovators.

Oehler and IBM Vice President Phil Hester believed strongly that high-performance computers had a future in business, despite so many of Oehler’s commercial projects that came close to delivery only to be killed or gutted by IBM’s combative bureaucracy.

Oehler “wanted to move PC servers upstream,” but IBM “couldn’t get its act together” on Power-based PCs. But in 1998, Oehler was invited to AMD to see something that made his dream seem achievable: A fast, inexpensive 64-bit processor that ran existing PC software at full speed. “AMD got it right on the first try,” he says.

So Oehler immediately advised IBM to pick up K8 (as Opteronwas known then). In 2000, Oehler tired of waiting for IBM to make its move and joined Newisys founders Hester and Clay Cipione, another IBM employee, in a startup that would take K8 beyond what AMD could do.

Oehler worked closely with AMD to tune the K8 for stability and performance, chasing the goal he’d always had at IBM: to create a bulletproof 64-bit enterprise platform with a PC price tag. He was so confident that he and Newisys had nailed it, he went back to Microsoft and IBM to convince them to climb on board.

Oehler and Newisys completed their work in record time. By the time AMD launched Opteron on April 22, 2003, hundreds of Newisys and Newisys-designed servers were already in customers’ hands. Microsoft, Computer Associates, SuSE, Red Hat, and other major software companies committed to porting 64-bit enterprise software to Opteron, a show of support AMD owes to the strength of the Newisys platform design. And after mulling it over for five years, IBM finally took Oehler’s advice: IBM announced in April that it will build Opteron-based servers.

The PC-priced, commercial, high-performance computer that Rich Oehler dreamed of is now a market-altering reality. And every Newisys 2100 server bears a concealed homage to Oehler’s long and distinguished career at IBM: A PowerPC RISC service processor.

Now Oehler is working on scaling Opteron beyond the two-way and four-way systems Newisys has already designed, and he’s collaborating with AMD on its next 64-bit CPU. Oehler’s brilliance as a technology designer, engineer, and visionary, combined with his commitment to reducing system costs through standard parts, software and interfaces, truly will move PC servers upstream.

(For profiles on the other nine 2003 InfoWorld Innovators, see Honoring the Innovators.)