EDN Executive Editor Ron Wilson writes in his blog about a panel he attended at HotChips 08 conference on What worked and what didn’t in CPU architecture. Here is an excerpt.
“Chaired by Nick Tredennick, who has been in microprocessor design since the Motorola 68000 development, the panel included Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood, Intel vice president and low-power processor pioneer Dave Ditzel, Techvision principal and MIPS pioneer John Mashey, the legendary Berkeley professor and RISC champion David Patterson, former Intergraph guru Howard Sachs of Telarity, and Microprocessor Report founder Michael Slater. As Tredennick said in his opening remarks, “these men need no introduction—if you don’t recognize them, just ask your parents.”
Setting the tone, Tredennick characterized the industry has having been “fooled by randomness.” Architecture is not a science, he argued, because it has only self-validation. “An architect creates a new architecture, and then we let him tell us about all its advantages and conceal all its problems. It’s like trying to form an opinion of kids by asking their parents. We should be asking the neighbors.”
The tone of the panel remained similarly light. But inevitably, when people of this caliber get together, some profound thoughts precipitated out of the levity. And given the diversity of experience on the panel, their observations were remarkably consistent. Taken together, they could almost form a little handbook of how to, and not to, do a CPU architecture.”
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