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ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named John L. Hennessy, former President of Stanford University, and David A. Patterson, retired Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, recipients of the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry. Hennessy and Patterson created a systematic and quantitative approach to designing faster, lower power, and reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microprocessors. Their approach led to lasting and repeatable principles that generations of architects have used for many projects in academia and industry. Today, 99% of the more than 16 billion microprocessors produced annually are RISC processors, and are found in nearly all smartphones, tablets, and the billions of embedded devices that comprise the Internet of Things (IoT).
Hennessy and Patterson codified their insights in a very influential book, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, now in its sixth edition, reaching generations of engineers and scientists who have adopted and further developed their ideas. Their work underpins our ability to model and analyze the architectures of new processors, greatly accelerating advances in microprocessor design.
Source: HPCWire
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday March 23 2018, @06:48PM (3 children)
Having learnt with the H/P bible at school and its happy RISC fictional architecture (yes i has been implemented in FPGAs), it was quite a shock to walk in the first job.
There, the "RISC" architecture was the super-bloated PowerPC, where the "reduced" instruction set was about 300 pages long.
Fun times, and always remember to eieio.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 23 2018, @08:31PM (2 children)
RISC was a religious thing when I was in grad school (late 1980s) - it can definitely be taken too far. Back then, there were people seriously advocating for minimal systems that were just barely Turing complete - arguing that the hardware could be optimized so much faster that it would execute the bloated software faster overall. (Spoiler: it can't when you take it too far.)
When clock speed leveled out around 2006/4GHz, I thought we were done worshiping RISC and instead started to worship the warring Gods of parallel processors and specialized processors like dedicated 64 bit floating point math units, special instructions to optimize image processing, etc.?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Friday March 23 2018, @08:45PM (1 child)
I remember the hype built-up prior to launch of HP/PA (Hewlett Packard Precision Architecture) based computers in 1986/87. It was supposed to be a revolution in the computing world. Sadly, the computers never lived up to their hype and over the years HP probably realised that they were beating a dead horse. In the mean time, HP also partnered with Intel to promote the HP/PA architecture but that was, too little, too late. HP stopped selling PA-RISC-based HP 9000 systems at the end of 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PA-RISC [wikipedia.org]
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Uncle_Al on Friday March 23 2018, @09:46PM
Nope, that was Itanium.
PA development suffered as resources were drained to support that.