  Computer Architecture, broadly, involves optimizing hardware and software for
current and future processing systems. Although there are several other top
venues to publish Computer Architecture research, including ASPLOS, HPCA, and
MICRO, ISCA (the International Symposium on Computer Architecture) is one of
the oldest, longest running, and most prestigious venues for publishing
Computer Architecture research. Since 1973, except for 1975, ISCA has been
organized annually. Accordingly, this year will be the 50th year of ISCA. Thus,
we set out to analyze the past 50 years of ISCA to understand who and what has
been driving and innovating computing systems thus far. Our analysis identifies
several interesting trends that reflect how ISCA, and Computer Architecture in
general, has grown and evolved in the past 50 years, including minicomputers,
general-purpose uniprocessor CPUs, multiprocessor and multi-core CPUs,
general-purpose GPUs, and accelerators.
