The Next Wave: Democratizing Computer Architecture, Moore’s Law and AI Subsets

In the latest episode of “The Next Wave,” Young Sohn speaks with Professor Emeritus David Patterson around discovering and coining the name for Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) design architecture, RISC-V and his involvement as Vice Chair of the Board of Directors, the differences in AI subsets and what it means for our technological future now that we are approaching the end of Moore’s law.

Whether you have an engineering degree, a curiosity for AI or are just wondering what powers your devices, Young’s conversation with Professor Patterson is bound to sate your appetite. As Professor Patterson describes, RISC architecture has grown to power everything from your cell phone to your laptop and even supercomputers. The tiny microprocessors were designed to increase the speed of our devices when it was discovered that 20 percent of the instructions in a computer are used to complete 80 percent of the work.

David Patterson is the Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, which he joined after graduating from UCLA in 1976. His research style is to identify critical questions for the IT industry and gather inter-disciplinary groups of faculty and graduate students to answer them. Professor Patterson’s best-known projects were Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC), Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), and Networks of Workstations (NOW), each of which helped lead to billion-dollar industries.
Patterson and as his teammates have won numerous awards. Including the ACM A.M. Turing Award, the C & C Prize, the IEEE von Neumann Medal, the IEEE Johnson Storage Award, the SIGMOD Test of Time award, the ACM-IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award, and the Katayanagi Prize. He was also elected to both AAAS societies, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame, and to be a Fellow of the Computer History Museum.
Professor Patterson has also coauthored seven book – including two with John Hennessy, the past President of Stanford University and with whom he shared the Turing Award. Patterson also served as Chair of the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley, Chair of the Computing Research Association, and President of ACM. He is currently Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the RISC-V Foundation.