UBC Computer Science
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2021–2023
1:21:07 · 99K views · Aug 16, 2019
David Patterson's talk on the history of computer architecture, from RISC and superscalar designs to the end of Dennard scaling and Moore's Law. It argues that domain-specific architectures and open instruction sets open a new golden age.
Recommended, including by Chris Lattner, as a history of CPU architecture and why performance gains slowed.
3 comments from Hacker News
The other talk Dr. Chris Lattner recommends watching is this one, and is very interesting David Patterson - A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture: History, Challenges and Opportunities this video I didn't realize IBM would have went with the Motorola 68000 for the IBM personal computer if Motorola had been ready. That would have been awesome for me because I could have applied my Mac 68000 asm skills to the much larger IBM PC market.
As I've said before, I just find it hard to believe that the very foreseeable problems lurking at the intersection of speculation, cache and protected mode were really such an unexpected shock to the industry this video . I have a jaded suspicion that in fact a fair few people had some idea, but they said nothing and didn't look closely because it would have been no fun, and in some cases not career-enhancing, to be the Jeremiah calling for major CPU deoptimisations. OTOH the very security-researcher heroes whose reputation is built on collecting trophies didn't seem to say much either, so maybe everyone really was completely blindsided?
Actually Moores law is dead. His prediction was not transistors would get smaller. His prediction was initial that for 10 years was that density would double every year. And then later that it would double every 18 month. And this held longer then even he thought. But it has ended. While things still get denser, its no longer on that same trend. This interview with Moore explains it: [LINK] History by Cantrill: [LINK] David Patterson perspective: this video Opposing point of view Jim Keller: [LINK] Patterson response to Keller: [LINK] There are talks by David Patterson, Jim Keller and