Andy was born in 1961, to Bill and Jean Glew, two English immigrants, an engineer and a physiotherapist, who were then living in an apartment on Riverside Drive in Saint Lambert. Shortly thereafter they moved to a house on de Picardie in Preville, which at that time was an independent town.

Andy, sister Amanda (C’81), and brother Simon attended Preville Elementary School and CCHS before the family moved to Hudson. Andy was one of the first batch of Preville students to go to high school at CCHS, as part of the French Immersion program. Phil Mizener, Andy’s friend from kindergarten, was another of the Preville kids at CCHS.

Favorite teachers: (i) Mme Campbell in Grade 7 French Immersion. (He still remembers when he started thinking in French.) (ii) Ms. Astrauskas for geometry and algebra, although mainly Andy was exempted from those math classes because they came naturally. Instead he spent that time in the library reading science fiction. (iii) Ms. Howie the Librarian. (iv) Mr. MacLean in Geography. (v) Mr. Weeks in Math. (vi) Mr. Howe for history, Although his chief memory of that class is being thrown out when he defended somebody else the teacher was picking on. (vii) Mr. West for English, specifically Shakespeare. (viii) Mr. Kreutzer for chemistry.

According to Andy he was active but not terribly good at sports - Mens Sana in Corpore Sano - Mr. Coffin’s high school track and cross country teams for the , mile, 1500m, 3000m. Andy is tickled to now be living near Nike’s headquarters, after all of Mr. Coffin’s stories about Oregon running. Andy and Philip trained for and completed the first Montreal Marathon during and just after high school. Andy was on nearly every year's CCHS soccer team, and outside school oscillated between intracity park teams and the inter-city Saint Lambert team, coached by Fraser Muir’s dad (who was never quite sure what to do with Andy). Andy was also on Saint Lambert’s swimming team in the first years of high school. Andy was more successful as a recreational skier and cyclist.

Andy was a brain. He won the prize for top grade every year, starting with French Immersion in Grade 7 (Sec. I), Grade 8. 9, 10 (Sec II-IV). Also history in Grade 10. However, in his last year, Grade 11 (Sec V) Andy turned over a new leaf and became an academic underachiever, as exemplified by his term grades in physics of 99-99-50-99, and the photo of Andy and Chris Nason playing chess in class. That last year Andy only won the math prize.

Andy went on to electrical engineering at McGill, computer option, having discovered computers in a summer internship at Concordia/Loyola between Grades 10 and 11. In fact, computers may explain Andy’s distraction from schoolwork in Grade 11, and at McGill, where he established a pattern of doing well, getting into Honors EE, flunking out, and repeating. In the end, having lost his scholarship, Andy graduated in 5 years rather than the official 3 and average 4 years of McGill EE, working 40+ hours per week operating an IBM RJE site, working as programmer on duty advising students taking classes, and running the undergraduate computer lab. The latter, running UNIX version 2-pi (>6, <7, and irrational), turned Andy on to UNIX and Open Source Software.

Andy’s first post-McGill job was at a computer startup in Dorval that was failing; Andy left without ever getting paid. First real job in Canada was at Systemes Videotex Formic, a computer graphics and database company in Saint Laurent. (You know those information kiosks in airports) Andy’s first real, real job was with Gould Computer Systems in Urbana, llinois, working on real-time UNIX, and secure UNIX, and where Andy eventually got to be the OS representative on a new hardware design effort.

Andy had wanted to be a computer architect, the guy who designs the actual computer, ever since he started on computers. Andy failed computer architecture twice at McGill, but was passed on his third try with a paper that the new teacher said could have been a Ph.D. Andy lucked out when it turned out that the Uinversity of Illinois at Urbana Champaign had hired a new computer architecture professor, Wen-Mei Hwu, under whom Andy’s research was all on out-of-order CPU microarchitecture, the form of register renaming that is in all modern computers. However, when Andy’s first wife graduated and wanted to leave Urbana, Andy got a quick and dirty MSEE in multiprocessor cache consistency.

Andy had expected to return to Motorola (which had meanwhile bought Gould’s “Little Software House on the Prairie”) to work on the 68050 or 88K++, but a civil libertarian stance on drug testing resulted in the interview part of a interview trip being cancelled. (Andy’s CCHS classmates may be surprised by this, since Andy was, and still is, the squarest of squares, never having smoked or used drugs. But Andy *does* believe in privacy.)

As a result, in 1991 Andy’s career took an unplanned but fortuitous detour to beautiful Portland, Oregon. Andy worked on the Intel P6 microarchitecture 1991-1996, sharing an Intel Achievement Award for what is still probably the most successful computer architecture in history. Unfortunately, Andy’s first marriage did not stand up to 80+ hour workweeks, and after helping set up Intel’s Microprocessor Research Labs, Andy went back to grad school in 1996 at the University of Wisconsin. There Andy met his wife Rhonda. Andy quit grad school for the second time a few months after their daughter Sophie was born in 1999.

Andy returned to Intel 2000-2002, where he worked on virtual machines and speculative multithreading. Frustrated with Intel, Andy moved to AMD 2002-2004, but that wasn’t much better so he returned to Intel 2004-2009. The chip Andy worked on at AMD is coming out this year (2011: “Bulldozer”). Andy may be the only person to move from Intel to AMD and back again. In his last years at Intel Andy worked on security, supercomputers, and graphics. For years, Andy’s resume said that his goal was to re-create Thomas Edison’s Invention Factory. Andy has 93 patents with Intel (at one time was Intel’s most prolific inventor), and 1 outside on his own. More patents are in application and may pass 100 this year. Nathan Myhrvold’s “invention capital” company “Intellectual Ventures” was a natural fit. Andy joined IV in 2009, splitting time between inventing and patent analyst. IV gives Andy the freedom to work from home in Hillsboro, or from Oceanside, Oregon (corner of Sunset Avenue and Ocean Street), where Andy runs, informally, Tsunami Tstate Tsuniversity’s computer architecture department, and works on his book, The Art of Computer Architecture. In October 2011 Andy left IV and returned to industry as a Principal Computer Architect with MIPS Technologies, which is based in Silicon Valley, although Andy continues to live in Oregon.

Andy's main claims to fame are P6, Linus Torvalds calling him God, being mentioned in the credits for Id Software's computer game "Quake", and being invited back to the Hacker's Conference.
(*see Notes in right hand column)

Andy's biggest kick was walking up an airplane aisle circa 1998, and realizing that every laptop onboard had something of him inside.