#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