David Patterson on Software Engineering Daily
RISC-V, AI and more ...
David Patterson needs no introduction for regular readers, or that matter for anyone with an interest in computer architecture. He’s the creator of the term ‘RISC’ the first RISC microprocessor, and more recently he’s been one of the key movers behind RISC-V.
RISC on a Chip: David Patterson and Berkeley RISC-I
If IBM pioneered RISC techniques, the 'RISC' name and the real impetus to make RISC mainstream came from the University of California, Berkeley with a team including David Patterson. Their work is still influential in designs we use today, including directly in the RISC-V architecture. Surprisingly, though, performance wasn't the initial motivation for the work at Berkeley.
After four decades at UC Berkeley he’s now spent almost a decade at Google working primarily on their TPUs.
Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Origins
Note: This is a two-part post. This part provides context and covers the story of the development of the first Google TPU. Part 2 looks at the architecture and the performance of the TPU in more detail.