Marc is a Distinguished Engineer and VP in the Office of the CTO (OCTO) at Microsoft. His current role is to drive the strategic and technical direction of the company on silicon and hardware systems from a cross-divisional standpoint. This includes Artificial Intelligence, from supercomputer to client devices to Xbox, etc., and general-purpose computing. Throughout his career, Marc has demonstrated a passion for translating high-level application requirements into optimizations up and down the stack, all the way to silicon. AI has been his focus for the past several years, but his interests also encompass accelerators for the cloud, scale-out systems, and process technology. He has given multiple keynotes on AI Hardware, published many papers on throughput computing, multi-cores, multithreading, transactional memory, speculative multi-threading, Java computing, etc. and he is an inventor of over 300 patents on those topics.
Prior to Microsoft, Marc was the CTO of Microelectronics at Sun Microsystems. As a Sun Fellow and SVP, he was responsible for the technical leadership of 1200 engineers. Throughout his career, he has started, architected, led, defined and shipped a variety of microprocessors such as superscalar RISC processors (UltraSPARC I/II), bytecode engines (picoJava), VLIW, media and Java-focused (MAJC), and the first processor to implement speculative multithreading and transactional memory (ROCK – first silicon). He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Sciences from UCLA and his Physics Engineering degree from Laval University in Canada. Marc is on the board of directors of QuantalRF.
