Keynote Fireside Chat: Computer Architecture Past, Present, and Future
summary
Survey of computing history leads to concrete claims: RISC now underpins 99% of machines, RISC replaces big CISC vocabularies with a small one and shows 25% more instructions but 5x faster reads, and industry responded by translating CISC to RISC (Pentium Pro). Moore’s Law slows and Dennard scaling ends (roughly a 10x performance gap in five years), driving domain-specific chips — second-generation TPU is liquid-cooled — and roughly dozens of startups plus cloud vendors building custom silicon.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction and speakers
- 1:50Early career paths
- 6:15Moore’s Law and its limits
- 9:27RISC architecture origins
- 13:41Industry adoption of RISC
- 15:48Vertical integration in tech
- 17:11Domain-specific hardware
- 21:04Machine learning hardware race
- 23:33Quantum computing outlook
- 26:47Industry and academia synergy
- 31:52Philanthropy in tech