David Patterson — Turing Award-winning computer scientist and UC Berkeley professor, known for pioneering RISC processor architecture and co-creating RAID storage. Co-author with John Hennessy of the seminal textbook Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach.
The gist
David Patterson walks through 50 years of computer architecture, from the invention of the microprocessor and Moore's law to the contrarian RISC-versus-CISC debates of the 1980s. He explains why simple instruction sets won, how the open-source RISC-V architecture could reshape the industry, and why domain-specific accelerators for machine learning are ushering in a new golden age as Moore's law slows. He also recounts the origins of RAID storage and reflects on teaching, wrestling, and a life well-lived. Throughout, he insists Moore's law is genuinely ending despite industry marketing to the contrary.
Big reveals
- RISC executed roughly 50% more instructions but ran about four times faster, settling the violently debated RISC-vs-CISC controversy.
- Intel survived the RISC revolution by translating its complex x86 instructions into RISC-like operations in hardware on the fly.
- RISC-V's open instruction set spread accidentally after industry users complained Berkeley kept changing it, revealing huge unmet demand.
- Patterson argues general-purpose computers are barely improving and the future is domain-specific accelerators, especially for machine learning.
- Patterson directly rebuts Jim Keller, calling the claim that Moore's law isn't dead 'just marketing' and citing quantitative transistor data.
- RAID was born when an IBM reviewer warned that 40 cheap PC disks would fail every two weeks, forcing the redundancy idea.
- Patterson's secret to a 50-year marriage: the nine magic words 'I was wrong, you were right, I love you.'
Things worth remembering
- Moore's 1965 paper not only predicted doubling transistors but foresaw computers in cars and grocery-store products.
- The UNIX operating system proved you could write something as complex as an OS in a high-level language like C.
- RISC-V's core is about 40 instructions that run all software, with optional subsets you add only if needed.
- Intel processors that once doubled performance every 18 months now improve only a few percent per year.
- Machine learning's heavy reliance on matrix multiply was a 'godsend' for hardware designers who know how to accelerate it.
- Patterson helped create MLPerf, a machine-learning benchmark suite that didn't exist until about two years before the interview.
- Two national reports concluded error-corrected quantum computing is likely a decade away, around 2030.
- Storage has shifted from spinning hard disks (about 60 revolutions per second) to semiconductor flash in most devices.
- Five UC Berkeley professors who won the campus Distinguished Teaching Award are all in the National Academy of Engineering, three with Turing Awards.
Recommended in this episode
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Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach
John Hennessy and David Patterson
“his book with John Hennessy is how I first learned about and was humbled by the inner workings of machines at the lowest level” — Lex Fridman 00:00:00Find it on Amazon
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach
John Hennessy and David Patterson
“he and I wrote a textbook at the end of the 1980s called computer architecture a quantitative approach” — David Patterson 00:30:18Find it on Amazon
The Ascent of Money
Niall Ferguson (inferred)
“I recommend the scent of money as a great book on this history also the audio book is amazing” — Lex Fridman 00:02:37Find it on Amazon