Dr. McCredie received his BS, MS, and PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois in 1985, 1987 and 1991, respectively. His primary interests were electromagnetic modeling and simulation. He then joined IBM and continued his work in packaging focused on IBM’s mainframe systems. In 1996 he began working on POWER based systems. His first assignment was on POWER3. He delivered the cache subsystem design and packaging.
Dr. McCredie became one of the lead architects of IBM’s POWER4 systems and chip and went on to become the POWER4 system chief engineer and delivered that system in 2001. The POWER4 systems propelled IBM from a trailing position as the #3 Unix system provider in the industry to its current position as the #1 Unix systems supplier.
After delivering the POWER4 systems, Dr. McCredie led the design and delivery of the POWER6 processor for IBM. POWER6 is the highest frequency processor in the industry and is the only processor in the industry to earn a #1 benchmark result in all of the major benchmarks including SPEC, TPC-C, SAP and Java. He then focused on POWER7 systems.
After leading the chip design team for over six years, he has taken on the system executive role for POWER7. His responsibilities included delivery of all system components including hardware and software elements. In 2004 Dr. McCredie was appointed to the position of IBM Fellow, IBM’s highest technical position; then in 2009 he was appointed to the position of IBM Vice President and Fellow and is now leading all POWER chip development for IBM systems.
