Never Stop Learning Computer Science

 I accidentally ran across this video from 1986, and I love it for so many reasons. First, the video is about RISC architecture, which I teach in my undergrad course. Second, it calls to mind a show I really like, Halt and Catch Fire , since the video is from the same era that the show portrays, the early days of my computer science adventures. Surprisingly, given that the video is 34 years old, it still is a good overview of RISC concepts. Here are some time-stamped highlights: 1:16 The PC alternative shown is Leading Edge (1200 baud modem woo-hoo!) My husband bought this stock way back when, and lost a bundle. He started calling the company "Bleeding Edge" 1:50 The guys play the "RISK" board game (flashback!) while describing technology challenges in scaling up to memory as MASSIVE as 8M! 5:00 David Patterson appears as his younger self 11:15 Ridge Computers? gone to the dustheap of startups, I suppose 13:45 Check out the boxy mouse! The machine costs $10,000. Yik...

The server microprocessor market hovers around $15 billion/year. The market is largely dominated by Intel, although AMD is hoping to bite off 10% this year.  In contrast, ARM historically focused on the mobile device and IoT markets, but now ARM is shouldering its way into the cloud computing market. Case in point is Amazon's Graviton2 custom processors that use 64-bit ARM cores. Eyes are on ARM due to its reputation for power-efficient cores with good performance.  Ampere's Antra Chip A new entry into the market this year, Ampere's Altra chip, may be a game-changer. The Altra features up to 80 single-threaded cores utilizing ARM v8 chips.  Ampere's Renee James, a former president of Intel, founded Ampere Computing in 2017 and is currently its Chairman and CEO. Ampere markets the Altra as 'the world's first cloud native processor'. Ampere's Mt. Jade rack dual-socket rack server includes fast DIMM  and NVMe solid-state drive support.  The Altra is a chip ...