YouSaid · the spoken record

John Hennessy

lines on the record: 71
first: 2018-04-25
most recent: 2018-04-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I think it's an interesting time. Here's this whole new set of applications which consume enormous amounts of computer power and produce incredible results. We have to rethink both the hardware and the software systems that we used to build them because they're both changing. We need to respond to these new kinds of applications and we need to change the way we design the machines. So that opens up opportunities for both software and hardware people. It's really a focus on co-design. So you've got to bring these people together and get them to work together to do something innovative. And that's always an exciting time when that happens in a field.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the one that I'm particularly interested in. And I think I talked about with RISC-V, this open source instruction set. In the past, we've had to wait for Intel. We have to beg Intel to make a change before we can do anything. Now we don't have to beg anybody. We can jump in there, come up, try ideas, put them online through these field programmable gate arrays and see if they work. And not only that, you don't have to work for Intel or ARM. Anybody in the world can do this. So we could see this. Potentially rapid acceleration of innovation around security with architecture and software systems. And we need to get better at this. And I can imagine this path working. And so, yeah, that's what I think that's a really exciting thing to work on.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're both optimists. I mean, if I was younger and had more energy, this golden age sounds pretty good to me. I think computer architects have Been asked enough to do enough about security. And for those of us in the industry, it's humiliating how bad security is. I don't think it's necessary. And I think hardware, which does things every nanosecond.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's a bunch of programs that I read about. So fortunately, you know, I'm glad I'm working at a place that seems to be taken seriously. I worry about for my grandchildren about the jobs and stuff like that.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think you're right, Karen. I think you're going to see disruption to white-collar jobs, not just the collar jobs. Yes, paying jobs. And I think the data that's out there shows that in the end it'll lead to economic growth and new opportunities, but there'll be a disruption just as it was during the Industrial Revolution. And you're right that it's going to happen much faster. So we're going to have to adjust. Many jobs are going to be what they call desked. So in other words, part of the skill set of the job will be taken over by the computer.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we could cut back, could we save a million lives a year with advanced technology? We could, right? And anybody who's know somebody who's been one of these terrible accidents changes their lives forever, we could make this over time much rarer event. And that would be one of the things we'd brag about like the internet, right? Right.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, but I mean, I think self driving cars is something that computer scientists have been talking about for a while. Yes, they have. We think this is, I mean, this will be, if it really works, this will be something we'll brag about forever. I mean, 1.2 million people die every year.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I suppose given the importance of technology. It's going to have to be all three parties coming together, right? It's difficult. That's probably a very difficult proposition to get government to work with and citizens, right? And the academia can play a part of bringing in knowledge and expertise without necessarily a bias of one form or another and help chart that. But it's not going to be easy to chart, Cara. I think it's going to be hard. I think most Americans probably haven't thought about... Okay, how much privacy am I willing to give up in exchange for what? They really haven't thought about the boundaries. Of course, they all use credit cards. And if you don't think everybody who touches that credit card is collecting information, you're being naive.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think certainly government wants to understand the technology and how to use it. I think the problem becomes when they want to legislate. Have a hard time writing legislation that keeps up with technology. Look at our copyright law. It's stuck in the seventeen hundreds, and we haven't been able to make the vital changes. And I think that's what we have to worry about. How do we craft regulations if we're going to have regulations? How do we craft regulations that don't inhibit innovation?”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the real danger here is a breakdown in trust. Because we trust companies, we give them our data, we give them, they have our email, we trust them, we trust Google to do a search properly. If we lose that trust element, then the tech sector will be abandoned by people. And whether it's information security, it's accuracy of data, it's accuracy of news feeds, all those things.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I can speak as a professor, as opposed, you know, I just the fact that they let somebody doing an app access to all Tens of mispeople data, that's kind of irresponsible. That's bad management. That's what I call it. Yeah, I mean, did they not realize that”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and I think there's a concern that humans will be removed from the loop in all these cases. And particularly if the technology were to be used for offensive warfighting or something like that, I mean, I think there are real dangers that we need to worry about. You have a technology. I mean, think about medical technology. It has both good uses and dangerous uses as well. It's the same thing here. Appropriately use the technology we find. Maliciously used, it'll be dangerous.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At least at Google, there's women. And so one of my colleagues at Berkeley is writing a book about fairness. So they seem to be taking these issues on. But right now, you know, there's big holes in the technology, and if we don't work on them, bad things could happen.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than AI itself. Yeah, it's not so much the hardware we're building, but the technology itself. Yeah, I think there's this argument that other fields have done a better job of when we get to these cultural issues like physicists and atomic energy and biology and dangerous bugs.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Image recognition is probably the best one. It's the one we can now we can have a program which is better at classifying breeds of dogs and cats than anybody but an AKC certified master which is absolutely amazing and self-driving cars. I mean they really depend on this ability to interpret scenes which are not easy to interpret for computers”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think you'll see all the, I think Apple, Amazon, Facebook will all, Microsoft are all investing in this technology because it appears the range of applicability for deep learning is quite broad. On very complex tasks that traditionally computers have not been able to do well.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“NVIDIA is kind of NVIDIA. NVIDIA is the reigning champion. That's where people go. Google, you know. I helped write papers about the TPU. The TPU that first generation, I think pretty successful. It was a time in normal computing, if you're like twice as fast, you kill everybody in the marketplace. We said that the TPU was like 30 to 80 times better, right? That's kind of amazing numbers. But because it's a new area and it does that one thing well, you can get these fantastic advantages.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Point that's a fair point. But in the past, it's always been a bad idea to do special purpose architectures. That was like, you know, the kiss of death. You do all that energy, and then how many are you going to sell? How many people? But now we have no choice with this ending of Morris Lawnard scaling. No other choice. We have to do special purpose architectures. And so the excitement of machine learning is it's kind of a narrow but general purpose technology and we have to figure out how to build, you know. Machines for those”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, I don't know. It needs to be that exotic. Transistors are pretty, silken transistors are pretty amazing technologies, even if it's slowing down. And they are going to get a little better. But it's like building, we want to build a building in a different way. We don't necessarily have to get rid of bricks.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of data that are pouring in. Yeah, well, we need to do things differently And I think researchers love it when we have to do things differently. Yes, we need as innovative ideas as maybe the risk ideas were.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the different things that hang off of it. Do you imagine that we need a breakthrough to get to that, correct, from what I understand, and especially with the massive amounts of data that are pouring in”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And all of a sudden, you've got these machines doing these comparatively special purpose tasks, but very different than traditional general purpose computers. So you can rethink how do you design a machine to do that function very fast? Virtual reality, augmented reality. You can think about all these intensive.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's why, I mean, we're researchers, right? And we think when it's unclear what to do, those are great times for researchers. When there's new challenges in Intel doesn't know what to do, ARM doesn't know what to do. That's a fantastic time to be a researcher in computer architecture because good ideas can win, right? When it's pretty, I think. Maybe 10 or years ago, it got kind of dull because any idea you had Intel would still go ahead and they knew how to make a lot of money. It'd be faster this year. Now it's really unclear. Right.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not enough. Yeah. And then there's another problem that we call the failure of Denard scaling. So Dennard was the guy who invented DRAMs, the one transistor DRAM. He made an observation that as you got more transistors, the power didn't go up. So you could actually do more computing for the same amount of energy. And that actually broke down. And so now the problem is, I mean, you look at a modern microprocessor from Intel, it slows this clock right down. It shuts itself off. Because otherwise, it's going to burn up So that's a challenge that we have to face as well. And I think the way to solve these problems is to rethink the way you design computers, which is why Dave and I think once again, it's a new golden.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been a golden other than 20 years. It was for quite some time. The last few years. There's been a slowdown. I mean, we talk about the end of Moore's law, right? Really, the slowdown of Moore's We also talk about another technology Yeah, it's doubling every few years, and that's kind of leveling.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we've collaborated on, we're going to share the talk since we co-author things. The title is A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture. And I think the four things that we think part of this golden age are what is called today's domain-specific architectures, which are like Google's TPU, you know what that is, for hardware for deep learning. Hardware for machine learning. Security is embarrassing. We think hardware people need to rise to the challenge and do something about it. There's this idea of an open, I talked about these vocabularies being this idea of an open vocabulary. There's something called risk five, which is an attempt to, it's to be like the Linux of microprocessors is an open thing that anyone can build. And finally, there's a thing called Agile Hardware Development, making it a lot easier to build. So I think those four things are going to lead to another golden age.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. In Berkeley, the classes, we have, I didn't know we could handle four digit class sizes. I didn't know if the system would work, but we have introductory courses in computer science with more than 1,000 students. So students are voting with their feet. And this is happening at campuses across the country. It's not just enough.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scale of the software systems we build now is phenomenal. If you tried to do that 30 years ago, we didn't have the tools to do it. So we try to teach them principles of abstraction organization so that they can do that. How to test a large piece of software? Because certainly a lot of software that gets released is buggy. We teach some principles of security so that they understand issues of security and privacy, which has become certainly vastly”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's a fantastic time to be a student in computer science. You have amazing computers at your fingertips. On the particular things that John and I do, it's much easier to build hardware than it was earlier. There's these things called field programmable gateway, which are kind of programmable hardware. So you can prototype your ideas and change them every day and connect them to the internet. And it's a real computer, but modifiable. So I think students getting their hands dirty. Well, you know, I got into computer science because I was a math major at UCLA and a math class was canceled and I took this software class and I was hooked, right?”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had, you know, I think when I was young, I had this strong belief in the public university teaching. You know, we were fulfilling the American dream. And I just had this little speech I gave when somebody asked about a startup as I'm going to be a professor. You know, it wouldn't have been that bad if I'd taken a couple years off and done a couple of years. But when I was young, I was kind of like strong-willed and I'm an academic and that's what I'm going to do.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Force is efficiency, forces it. You know, and I think as we move into this next era where we're talking about Devices that may have processors in them that may last for 10 years. With a single battery. Power is going to matter a lot. Yeah, I want to”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the mobile really drove it because all of a sudden you cared both about what the processor cost, but you also cared a lot about energy efficiency. And that's one thing the so-called CISC approach, right, that was the traditional approach, has never been able to close the gap. So it consumed more energy. Didn't matter so much on a desktop machine. Maybe you need a fan instead of not having one. But it wasn't a big differentiator. But in the mobile space, powers everything. You really do have to worry about energy. And as we move into this next generation.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because then the ARM processor that you've heard of, well, the R and ARMs for risk, so it's advanced risk machines. So that got increasingly popular Is part of my retirement. I went around and gave a lot of talks, and so I collected a bunch of data, but basically, probably this year there'll be 20 billion microprocessors sold and 99% of those will be.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And in the early days, it was transistors in silicon area. Today it's still silicon area because if you look at Internet of Things, you've got computers all over the place that have to sell for a dollar or two. Right.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has kind of an interesting trajectory. For maybe 15 years, anybody whose risk Had the fastest computer in the world. But then the really good engineers at Intel figured out that they could actually translate their rich vocabulary Into the simpler volcano in hardware, and then any of the risk ideas they could use. And then they had a lot more money so they could have bigger engineering teams and really good technology. So eventually Intel kind of used the risk ideas against the rest of the risk companies and took over the marketplace in the PC era. And NPCs did really well. But starting in 2007 with the iPhone, which I guess is the beginning of the Post Piece here, well, suddenly there's this place, as John said earlier, where they cared about efficiency. Which is kind of similar to what we cared about early on”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, people didn't believe it at the beginning. I mean, just building on what Dave said about this contrarian viewpoint, I was on one panel and it was a An antagonist on the panel, an opposing viewpoint. And somebody said, well, Hennessy just got a million dollars from the venture capitalists to go build this company. What should he do? And without blinking, he says, take the money and go to South America. Oh, my God.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody wasn't doing it. That's the primary reason. And, you know, I knew that it was going to take a lot of time. Would I go back to the university? Would I stay at the company? I mean, I wasn't exactly clear. So that's how we got started.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the early guys at death Came to me and said, You've got to start a company because otherwise these ideas are not going to get out there. And I talked to a couple colleagues and we decided to do it somewhat reluctantly, of course. It wasn't something I had.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Digital equipment corporation actually had a West Coast lab at that. Some of those people had worked on our project and picked up the ideas, but they, in turn, couldn't get the East Coast guys to accept the ideas. So, in the end, what happened was a famous computer pioneer came to see me and said, you have to start a company, Gordon Bell.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That didn't happen. Well, one of the things that happen is because it was controversial, there were a series of debates that John and I participated from coast to coast. And I think I remember John saying at the time, by the third debate, I think people thought, okay, there's some ideas here. Maybe because John actually wrote the paper that had the scientific explanation. Explanation. I think maybe by then we had it. Maybe not.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, what happened with this? So, you did these graduate programs coming up with Greenfield approach or Clean State, however you want to phrase it. What were you going to, what did you think it would lead to as a new processing?”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reduced instructions at computer. I think the notion of trying to target the instruction set for fast implementation, for efficient implementation really is probably the right word, Kara, because I think today we care as much about energy as we care about execution speed. And I think that was the key thing. Lots of things were changing. It was a time when a lot of the computer industry was changing. We were moving from writing an assembly language. Remember, Unix was just coming of age, the first operating system written in a high-level language as opposed to an assembly language. And of course, that influenced our thinking as well. And I began the same way Dave did with a brainstorming class of graduate students just to say,”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the things I did when I, it's unusual for an assistant professor to take a sabbatical. It was fortunate but unusual. And so it gave me a chance to think about what can you do well in the university and what not so well. And academics don't have real deadlines except for courses. Courses are absolutely going to start and stop. So I thought, well, why don't I tie the research to the courses and then we'd have deadlines and be able to make steady progress. And so that's why that was the trick, or that was the idea that we were trying to do. And then I think in the first quarter or second quarter.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it got started at Berkeley actually in a series of graduate courses. I had done a sabbatical at DEC where they were doing this conventional wisdom, as I mentioned earlier about the really rich vocabularies. And it led to a bunch of bugs that my sabbatical, I was trying to help them with the bugs that they had in their equipment. And so when I got back the microprocessor guys, as we said earlier, weren't really experts in computers. So they were just going to imitate what the big guys did. And so I wrote this paper. that said, okay, if the microprocessor people imitate the big guys, there's going to be a lot of bugs and we're going to have to figure out how to repair it. And the paper was rejected. And the rejection was, this is a stupid way to design microprocessors. Well, that kind of, I kind of, if you're going to do it, it's going to have bugs and it is stupid. So there must be, there's...”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And fortunately for me, John, despite having this little teeny job as president, every five years or so work on the next edition. So I think he did three editions of the six editions while he was president. And had he said the entirely reasonable thing is I've got a day job. I can't do this running stage. That would have been the end of the book.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, change their attitude. Microsoft actually put it in their company store so you could get a copy at the same time you ordered a pen or a pad of paper. You could get a copy of our book. And that showed that there was really a different way of thinking about it. And I think, and over the years, the book's been translated into more than a dozen languages and used around the world. And it's been for us, it's been a remarkable opportunity to teach students all around the world.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think we tried to capture this approach. I think probably one of the things that surprised us is in the first year, we sold as many copies to practicing engineers as we did to classroom settings. And that was a real change. In fact, Microsoft”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we were following the ideas in the book we followed in our work. And so we were taking the title of the book Quantitative Approach. We thought you should be able to run experiments before you build anything and compare two different ways to do it and get a number to say which one's better. And that's how we were doing it. And we just got increasingly frustrated with the textbooks, which were still from the supermarket catalog era of describing architecture. So the actual triggering event was I... See that I was probably going to become chair of computer science in Berkeley, and we were supposed so naive about administration that I thought my life would be over. I said, oh my God, my life is going to end. We have to write the book right now.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was another issue involved in selling our story about this technology, and that was we didn't really have a firm scientific, quantitative explanation of why we could run programs so much faster. And that made it harder to convince people. We had data, but we couldn't give the scientific explanation of why this is true. And getting that, figuring out that explanation and getting that right, that was the beginning of really our book effort because we said, well, there's a much better way to design computers based on principles rather than on what Dave and I would call the supermarket textbook of computer architecture. Here's one from column A, here's one from column B, here's one from column C. No attempt to compare them or see how they see what the trade-offs were.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but John and I think are both kind of natural collaborators. And we could have decided Mai's threat way, his is the wrong way. But fortunately, we were young but wise enough that we need more people on our side. There's a lot of people out there who don't think this is a good thing to do. Let's take the, we'll be on the same team.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT