For the United States' 250th anniversary, the University of Maryland's Terp magazine set out to highlight "25 Terp Innovations That Changed History." In a recent follow up story featuring inventions that they missed, an invention by Uzi Vishkin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and long-time UMIACS faculty member, was at the top of that list. From the story:
"Parallel computing — the technology that lets computers, tablets and smartphones juggle on-screen graphics, a YouTube video and other tasks – stems from research by Vishkin. Of all the game-changing technologies we didn’t include, this one sits at the top of the list.
Professional bios of Vishkin that we read as we sifted through possible article topics seriously underplayed the ubiquity of his 2005 invention for building parallel processing into a computer’s central processing unit (CPU), with one referring to its use in "over a billion" devices. Not bad, but the true count is probably over 20 billion … or maybe over 40 billion. No authoritative count exists of all the chips built into computing devices since Vishkin laid the groundwork for the CPU-plus-integrated-graphics chips that became standard in the 2010s. Whatever the true total, it’s history-changing."