Professor Yale Patt

University of Texas at Austin

www.ece.utexas.edu/~patt

"Future Microprocessors: Multi-core, Multi-nonsense, and What we must do differently moving forward"

Abstract:

Now that we have broken the threshold of one billion transistors on a chip and multi-core has become a reality, a lot of buzz has resulted -- from how/why  we got here, to what is important, to how we should determine how to  effectively use multicore.  In this talk, I will examine a number of these new "conventional wisdom" nuggets of information to try to see whether they  add value or get in the way.  For example: what can we expect multicore to do about saving power consumption? is ILP dead?  should sample benchmarks  drive future designs?  is hardware sequential? should multicore structures  be simple?  is abstraction a fundamental good?  Hopefully, our examinations will help shed some light on where we go from here.

Bio:

Yale Patt is a teacher at The University of Texas at Austin, where he also directs the research of nine PhD students, while enjoying an active consulting practice with several microprocessor manufacturers.  He regularly teaches the required Introduction to Computing course to more than 400+ freshmen and his advanced graduate course in Microarchitecture to those planning careers as cutting-edge computer architects.  He holds the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering and is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  His research ideas (HPS, branch prediction, etc.) have been adopted by almost every microprocessor manufacturer on practically every high end chip of the past ten years.  His commitment to undergraduate education has resulted in his motivated bottom-up approach for introducing computing to freshmen and his overhaul of the senior course in computer architecture  for preparing students for industry or PhD research.  He has received many of the highest honors in the field for both his research and teaching, including the IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, the IEEE Emmanuel R.  Piore Technical Field Medal, the IEEE Charles Babbage Award, and the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award.  More detail is available on his web site www.ece.utexas.edu/~patt.