Heard at Hot Chips: 20 years of what worked and what didn’t in CPU architecture.

“You might imagine that somewhere in a back room at conferences the old hands at microprocessor architecture get together over dinner and a few bottles of wine–the sort that must be concealed in expense reports–lean back in their chairs, and talk long into the night about lessons learned and lessons repeated.”

Setting the tone, Nick Tredennick characterized the industry has having been “fooled by randomness.” Architecture is not a science, he argued, because it has only self-validation. “An architect creates a new architecture, and then we let him tell us about all its advantages and conceal all its problems.”

“When people of this caliber get together, some profound thoughts precipitated out of the levity. And given the diversity of experience on the panel, their observations were remarkably consistent. Taken together, they could almost form a little handbook of how to, and not to, do a CPU architecture.”