VISEN Center, The Dean of Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology

 Distinguished Lecture Series

Yale Patt

 Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of Texas at Austin

Date: April 17th

Location: DH 1070

Time: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm

 The Challenges of Multicore: Information and Misinformation

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.

Biography of Yale Patt:

Yale Patt is a teacher at The University of Texas at Austin. He holds the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering and is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research in computer architecture, done jointly with his PhD students, has resulted in among other things the HPS microarchitecture (1985), the Block-structured ISA (1989), the Two-level Branch Predictor (1991), SSMT aka helper threads (1999), Runahead Execution for out-of-order machines (2003), and ACMP (2008). He has earned appropriate degrees from reputable universities and more than enough awards for his research and teaching. More detail is available on his web site http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~patt