Description
In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes 2024 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award recipient Wen-Mei Hwu, Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Wen-Mei discusses the evolution of Moore’s Law and the significance of Dennard Scaling, which allowed for faster, more efficient processors without increasing chip size or power consumption. He explains how his research group’s approach to microarchitecture at the University of California, Berkeley in the 80s led to advancements such as Intel’s P6 processor. Wen-Mei and Scott discuss the early days of processors and the rise of specialized processors and new computational units. They also share their predictions about the future of computing and advancements that will be required to handle vast data sets in real time, and potential devices that would extend human capabilities.