#104 – David Patterson: Computer Architecture and Data Storage

David Patterson is a Turing award winner and professor of computer science at Berkeley. He is known for pioneering contributions to RISC processor architecture used by 99% of new chips today and for co-creating RAID storage. The impact that these two lines of research and development have had on our world is immeasurable. He is also one of the great educators of computer science in the world. His book with John Hennessy "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" is how I first learned about and was humbled by the inner workings of machines at the lowest level.

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Here's the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

OUTLINE:

00:00 - Introduction

03:28 - How have computers changed?

04:22 - What's inside a computer?

10:02 - Layers of abstraction

13:05 - RISC vs CISC computer architectures

28:18 - Designing a good instruction set is an art

31:46 - Measures of performance

36:02 - RISC instruction set

39:39 - RISC-V open standard instruction set architecture

51:12 - Why do ARM implementations vary?

52:57 - Simple is beautiful in instruction set design

58:09 - How machine learning changed computers

1:08:18 - Machine learning benchmarks

1:16:30 - Quantum computing

1:19:41 - Moore's law

1:28:22 - RAID data storage

1:36:53 - Teaching

1:40:59 - Wrestling

1:45:26 - Meaning of life