The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

The microprocessor is 50 years old. 50 years ago, a single ALU at kHz speeds had to be shared by multiple tasks, multiple applications, multiple users and multiple organizations. Due to transistor scaling we can now have 1M ALUs on a chip at GHz speeds. In this talk I will swap the cause and effect equation, instead of talking about solutions to problems, I will talk about problems created by solutions. Today data movement dominates compute time. I will describe how by optimally solving the data flow challenge, we are introducing a conflict with the past, the present and the future; conflicts with science, technology, legal and business structures; conflicts with FLOPS, complexity theory, and supply chains. Most recently, AI chips started forming the backbone of a concerted effort around the world, to break the dead end position of the classical computing industry, and show multiple ways forward. Bio: Oskar Mencer is CEO of Maxeler Technologies, which has been recently acquired by Groq, an AI chip company, to join forces in building the future of computing. Oskar is a Technion graduate who grew up in the Parallel Systems Lab, class of ‘94, went on to Stanford, the Unix group at Bell Labs, Imperial College London, and more recently, became a member of Academia Europaea, and the Technion Board of Governors.