EE Distinguished Lecture Series

Computer Architecture in the Age of Agentic AI

William J. Dally

Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research at NVIDIA Corporation and an Adjunct Professor and former chair of Computer Science at Stanford University

Abstract

Within the past year large-language models (LLMs) have become capable of designing hardware (generating RTL), exploring a design space, generating candidate architectures, and evaluating these architectures. These LLMs are powerful tools that enable a single designer, or a small team, to design complex systems in a short period of time. With these tools, however, the role of a human hardware engineer changes dramatically. Hardware engineers are now hardware managers - managing teams of AI agents that carry out the actual architecture and design work. This has implications for how we should be educating hardware engineers.

Biography of William J. Dally

Bill is Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research at NVIDIA Corporation and an Adjunct Professor and former chair of Computer Science at Stanford University. Bill is currently working on developing hardware and software to accelerate demanding applications including machine learning, bioinformatics, and logical inference. He has a history of designing innovative and efficient experimental computing systems. While at Bell Labs Bill contributed to the BELLMAC32 microprocessor and designed the MARS hardware accelerator. At Caltech he designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and the Torus Routing Chip which pioneered wormhole routing and virtual-channel flow control. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology his group built the J-Machine and the M-Machine, experimental parallel computer systems that pioneered the separation of mechanisms from programming models and demonstrated very low overhead synchronization and communication mechanisms. At Stanford University his group developed the Imagine processor, which introduced the concepts of stream processing and partitioned register organizations, the Merrimac supercomputer, which led to GPU computing, the ELM low-power processor, and the DARWIN genomics processor. Bill is the 2025 recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computing and Cognitive Science and a recipient of the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Bill is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received the ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, the IEEE Seymour Cray Award, the ACM Maurice Wilkes award, the IEEE-CS Charles Babbage Award, the IPSJ FUNAI Achievement Award, the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award, and the Stanford Tau-Beta-Pi Teaching Award. He was a member of President Biden's council of advisors on science and technology. He currently leads projects on computer architecture, network architecture, circuit design, and programming systems. He has published over 250 papers in these areas, holds over 160 issued patents, and is an author of four textbooks.