The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Multicore has been around for several years now, and we hear it touted as the panacea of everything. ...until recently, that is. As expected, the hype has generated a lot of nonsense. We are told that multicore came about as a solution to a performance problem, that multicore allows you to run your problems at half the frequency and save power, that ILP is dead, that Moore's Law means we can put thousands (perhaps millions?) of cores on a single silicon die, that hardware works sequentially, and that abstraction is a pure good. Most recently, the term dark silicon has been coined as one of the bad consequences of the continual viability of Moore's Law. In this talk, I propose to examine some of the nonsense, and in particular, see if some of these "bugs" can be turned into "features."

Bio: Yale Patt is a teacher at the local public university in Austin, Texas. He has enjoyed almost 50 years (so far) in computing: teaching, doing research, and consulting. Some of his research (e.g., HPS, branch prediction) have found their way into successful microprocessors. His unconventional but CORRECT approach to introducing serious students to computing has found its way into the curriculum of more than 100 universities worldwide and a breakaway textbook,"Intro to Computing, from bits and gates to C and beyond." He earned the obligatory degrees from reputable universities and has received more than enough awards for his research and teaching. More detail can be found on his web site: www.ece.utexas.edu/~patt.