#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. Support this
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Cash App (Google Play): https://bit.ly/2MlvP5w This conversation is
part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like
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please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or
support it on Patreon. 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