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

“A real threat to their existing background. Wipe them out because And someone, I think it was Disney when they were getting into online stuff. The CEO at the time, I think it was Bob Eiger, said, we might as well eat our lunch our We were going to have our lunch eat, and we might as well eat it ourselves, which was”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big systems, right? And one of the reasons I think in the end that the technology was not adopted quickly was that it did pose a real threat to their existing quantitative. And we see this all the time, Kara. Companies, rather than kind of endanger their own product line, will let a startup come along and wipe them out because they're just too nervous about the establishment of the product.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so there was everything varying from, you guys are just crazy, you're just academics, you don't know what you're doing, to if you start a company and develop this technology, you're going to undermine the large computer companies.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's also a philosophical argument that led to a lot of anger, which was the belief of these bigger richer vocabularies is that hardware would be quote-unquote closer to the software. So maybe all the problems we were having with software with projects failing and filled with bugs was because the hardware wasn't very good. And if we just had a richer vocabulary, a bigger richer vocabularies, it software would be easier And then these two idiots come along and say the opposite of them. Right. Not only is that guy going to help, you're going the wrong way. You should go backwards. So this got people angry. These were dangerous ideas that were going to destroy the computing industry. Why would it destroy?”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The naysayer argument varied from academic, I think the one that was repeated most often was these are academic projects. When you scale them up to be real computers, all the advantages that these papers have written about will go away.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started, we were running research groups which people think, okay, Berkeley and Stanford are competing. But the truth is we were both on the same side of the line and there were a lot of people who were naysayers who didn't believe our technology was.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's how the right way to do it. And John and I'm idea was, well, in this fast changing microprocessors, let's do the opposite. Let's have a very small, very simple vocabulary, monosyllabic words. And then the question was going to be how fast could we execute those words? How fast you could think of as reading the words? How fast could computers read those words? Well, they have to read more words if they're simple, but the question was how many more words would they have to read and how fast could you read them? And it turned out the risk, which was the reduced... Vocabulary is we had to read about 20% more words, but we could read them four times faster. So it was like a factor of three win.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we were both, in fact, people ask where the story Risk came from, is once we hit upon the ideas of this different way to design computers, which is explainable. Go ahead. Oh, okay, well, let's do that. So when software talks to hardware, there's a vocabulary you talk to it. And the minicomputer and mainframe eras, the prevailing wisdom was that you want these very rich vocabularies, you know, $5 words, polysyllabic words.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, racks of hardware designed using a technique called bit slice, so you'd have one chip might implement four bits of adder, another four bits of an adder. And they were, you know, they sold for a hundred thousand to a million dollars, basically. Key space, right? The VAX 11780, their big machine that was a big success. Sold for $250,000 to $500,000.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was an interesting question because I think it was the question that Dave and I both asked, which is how should these computers be designed? Should we keep copying mini computers, which is what they had been doing? Or should we rethink how the computers should be designed, given this fairly dramatic change in the underlying implementation technology? Right, absolutely.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nothing substantive. And it was the early microprocessors were just growing up. They were just beginning to be thought of as computers. And there were these development systems you could buy to develop hardware, to develop microprocessors, primarily for laboratory control still. Right, right. But the field was changing, and it was clear, I think, if you looked at it that within a few years you were going to be able to build a real computer on a single chip.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my wife made this decision too because we had two kids and our siblings had houses and we didn't. And she said, well, look, if you go to Berkeley, can you change your mind going to industry? And I said, yes. And she said, well, if we go to industry, can you go to Berkeley? And I said, no. She said, okay, we'll be poor but proud.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But he took up my resume and said, huh, you know, I think they made an offer to somebody else who had turned them down. And he said, huh, this guy, and then he handed to somebody who was coming to Southern California and we hit it off. And so I got a job there. If my wife hadn't forced me to call, I wouldn't.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I should tell you my Berkeley story is I'm there because of my wife. She grew up in Northern California as a kidman, and I met her in high school. And I interviewed at a bunch of places, but he hadn't heard from Berkeley. And she said, You've got to call Berkeley to find out. So she made me call as a graduate student that the chair of the department at Berkeley, good for your wife. Yeah, you know, as a grad student, it was just humiliating. And he said, okay, Dave, I got your thing here. Well, you're in the top 10, but not the top five. He said, oh, wow. So as a grad student, I thought, oh, that wasn't as bad as I thought. But it turns out he said that to anybody who called. Oh.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the good news is I interviewed at Stanford in March and we were having a drought. So the weather was beautiful, it was sunny. I flew back to the East Coast. It was sleeting at JFK when we landed. I looked at my wife and said, if I get that job in California,”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I grew up on the East Coast, got my college degrees there, had the good fortune to stumble on my PhD thesis, which involved programming microprocessors. In those days, people can't think back that far, but microprocessors were used for laboratory control. There were no personal computers, nothing like that So I got involved in building a programming language to program microprocessors for real time control applications. Turned into an interesting area, started interviewing. Stanford was the 14th school I interviewed. And so I interviewed everywhere from Wisconsin and Iowa and Illinois all the way out to.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, as John and I will probably say, the center of the computing universe for hardware was the East Coast. The two main places were. IBM in New York and Digital Equipment Corporation. Deck in Boston. And so when John and I wanted to go try and influence the computer industry, we had to get an airplane fly to go there.”
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 an actually interesting question. Kind of what I did for my dissertation was kind of half software and half hardware. So when I went on the interview market, there were places that considered me as a software person and places a hardware person. Berkeley wanted to get into hardware, so I said, okay, I'll work on that.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, why was I, you know, Berkeley's a great place? I wanted to try being a professor. I wanted to see, I was the oldest of my family. I have three younger brothers and sisters. And kind of we'd sit around the dining room table doing homework and I'd end up teaching the material. So I enjoyed teaching. And so I wanted to see if I could both do teaching and research at a place like Berkeley.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Berkeley was trying to growing his computer science department. They were really great in what's called computer science theory and in programming languages, and they went to branch out into other areas. And the first one was hardware, and then later they branched out into AI.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We will make jokes if you like. All right, okay. I'm the first of my family to graduate from college, got all my degrees at UCLA, and spent all of my life at UC Berkeley. So all I know is giant public universities. And yeah, okay.”
2018-04-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners, 2017 Turing Award · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT