
John Hennessy and David Patterson Turing Award Lectures (2018) [video] - espeed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LVeEjsn8Ts&t=122
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CaliforniaKarl
John and David will be giving a talk next week Wednesday (October 10) in
Stanford's Computer Systems Colloquium (EE380). The topic is Computer
Architecture; the title has not yet been announced. Expect it to be up on
YouTube at
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMWw6rRoeSp...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMWw6rRoeSpkiseTHzWj6vu)
on Thursday or Friday next week.

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chubot
Great talk! My main takeaway is that they advocate hardware-software co-design
to improve performance. Performance issues push software in the direction of
domain-specific languages, and hardware in the direction of domain-specific
architectures (e.g. TPUs for machine learning).

I think DSLs have a lot of advantages for software engineering reasons, but
not everyone agrees. But it doesn't appear to be debatable that they have
advantages for performance!

Previous thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18009581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18009581)

(FWIW, the research projects mentioned there count as DSLs ...)

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yazr
Well hand TPU for ML is a great example (about x1000 speed improvement for
tensor computation over a CPU).

BUT ....

TPU is just a specialized GPU which has been around for 20 years? So very slow
evolution of a pre-existing HW component

Deep learning has been around for 5 years and we already have 2 or 3
generation of frameworks. So very rapid revolution of DSL implemented on
abstracted HW

Which is the complete opposite HW-SW advocacy ?

~~~
yazr
(cont.)

What maybe i am trying to say that a "sufficiently-clever-compiler" can
probably make more progress in cache performance that waiting for a great new
memory-cpu architecture to appear ?

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ivan_ah
Interesting off-the-cuff comments[1] about quantum computing in the question
period:

Patterson: You may get a question "Won't quantum computing ..." — No! Quantum
computing is a really exciting; it's not going to happen tomorrow.

Hennessy: It's about on the same time-scale as fusion design.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LVeEjsn8Ts&t=1h12m58s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LVeEjsn8Ts&t=1h12m58s)

