computer architecture

David Patterson's talk on the history of computer architecture, from RISC and superscalar designs to the end of Dennard scaling and Moore's Law. It argues that domain-specific architectures and open instruction sets open a new golden age.

Michael Steil and Christian Hessmann's 34C3 talk explaining the Apollo Guidance Computer end to end: hardware design, operating system, and mission software.

Brian Troutwine's Code Mesh 2015 talk on the Apollo Guidance Computer. It covers the AGC's design, core rope memory, its interrupt and software behavior, and the pioneering engineering effort behind it.

R. Stanley Williams of HP Labs gives a keynote on the memristor, covering the physics, crossbar computation, and potential for memory and new computer architectures.

Bryan Cantrill of Oxide Computer Company gives a Stanford EE380 talk on rethinking the server. He argues that hyperscaler-style rack-scale machines with open firmware, RISC-V and Rust should be available to everyone, not just the giants.

Dave Ackley gives a high-level introduction to robust-first computing, which prioritizes robustness over efficiency in computer architecture. A sorting demo illustrates the idea.

Seymour Cray's only surviving recorded talk, introducing the Cray-1 supercomputer in 1976. He describes the machine's design, including its vector architecture and cooling through the frame.

Robert C. Martin's Ruby Midwest 2011 keynote argues that software architecture should express the application's intent rather than its framework. He covers separating entities, interactors and boundaries so the web, database and framework are details.

James Howard Kunstler's TED talk argues that American public spaces and architecture have become unworthy of care, damaging civic life. He presents suburban sprawl and car-first design as failures of the common good.

Simon Brown's Agile on the Beach 2019 talk presents the C4 model, a lightweight approach to diagramming software architecture with a shared vocabulary and simple notation.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) talks about clean architecture and design, including keeping the database and frameworks out of the center of an application. It is an hour-long conference talk.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) presents the principles of Clean Architecture, covering dependency direction, boundaries, and why frameworks and databases should be details rather than the center of an application.

Mark Seemann argues that functional programming naturally yields many of the best practices object-oriented developers learn painfully. He shows how functional architecture leads to a pit of success, with a pure core and impure shell.

Brandon Rhodes' PyOhio 2014 talk on applying the Clean Architecture in Python. He shows how this high-level design pattern fits Python's features and addresses maintainability problems in large applications.

Christopher Alexander's keynote at OOPSLA 1996 on patterns in architecture, addressed to the software community. He moves beyond patterns toward deeper ideas of wholeness and living structure.

PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny gives a deep dive into the PS5's architecture, covering its SSD, I/O, audio and design goals. He explains how removing bottlenecks shapes future games.

A full-day recording of the University of Utah computer science department's 50th anniversary event with panels, keynotes and talks by alumni and pioneers. It includes Ivan Sutherland's presentation on single flux quantum electronics.

Nicholas Zakas of Yahoo discusses architecture for large, modular JavaScript web applications. He lays out the theory behind building front ends that scale in complexity.

Martin Fowler's GOTO Chicago 2017 talk on the different things people mean by event-driven architecture. He identifies four patterns, including event notification and event-carried state transfer.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

Michael Steil's 25C3 talk covers the Commodore 64's architecture, quirks and demoscene tricks in about an hour. It aims to convey everything about the machine in a compact, nostalgic tour.

Simon Knowles, co-founder and CTO of Graphcore, talks about "intelligence processors", chips designed specifically for machine learning. The talk was given at the RAAIS 2017 summit and covers Graphcore's architecture.

Bob Nystrom, author of Game Programming Patterns, gives a Roguelike Celebration 2018 talk questioning whether entity component systems are the only way to structure a game. He walks through alternative architectures drawn from roguelike development.

Bryan Cantrill's Scale By The Bay 2019 talk on software after Moore's Law. He covers the end of easy scaling and the move toward specialized, emerging architectures.

Connor Krukosky, an 18-year-old college student and vintage computer collector, tells how he bought an IBM z890 mainframe and got it running at home. The talk was given at SHARE in San Antonio in March 2016.

Dave Jaggar, who defined much of the ARM architecture, recounts how Acorn's near-extinction led to ARM, including the history of Thumb, StrongARM, and the Austin team.

A GDC 2015 talk in which Natalya Tatarchuk describes the multithreaded renderer Bungie built for Destiny. It covers the low-latency architecture across platforms, its successes and its challenges.

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains in this 2017 GDC session how Overwatch uses an Entity Component System architecture for layered gameplay. He also covers its server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and how they keep the game responsive and fair.

Casey Muratori's long talk arguing that modern software has ballooned to tens of millions of lines because of hardware and OS diversity. He proposes a stable ISA for entire system-on-a-chip packages and recalls when games shipped with their own boot disk.

Jim Keller gives a UC Berkeley EECS colloquium arguing that Moore's Law is not dead. He surveys upcoming technologies and the multiple innovation curves that can keep transistor density and performance scaling.

Jack Moffitt presents the architecture of Servo, Mozilla's experimental browser engine written in Rust, focusing on parallelism across cores, GPUs and SIMD and the safety properties gained from Rust.

A Strange Loop 2019 talk by Aaron Cummings on the computing systems aboard Voyager 1 and 2, which control the spacecraft and record and return data decades after launch in 1977.

Cliff Click walks through a small performance example on a modern out-of-order CPU. He covers pipelining, ILP, CISC vs RISC, multicore, and why cache misses and the memory subsystem dominate performance.

Joe Armstrong's GOTO 2018 talk contrasts the problems computer scientists study with the problems users have. He revisits forgotten great ideas such as tuple spaces, flow-based programming, Xanadu and Unix pipes, with anecdotes.

Chris Celio of UC Berkeley compares the RISC-V, ARM and x86 instruction sets, with quantitative data on instruction counts and code density. It examines how the compressed extension fares against Thumb and x86.

A PyCon 2012 talk by Kurt Grandis on building an automated water-squirting turret that uses Python and computer vision to detect and drive off squirrels from a bird feeder.

Bill Dally of NVIDIA gives a Hot Chips 2023 keynote on the challenges of building hardware for deep learning. He traces how GPUs have been adapted for machine learning, especially training.

Jim Keller's talk at the 2020 Scaled Machine Learning conference on Moore's Law in the age of AI chips. He compares scalar, vector and GPU-style parallel approaches to computation.

Michael Bryzek of Flow gives a QCon London 2018 talk on key decisions for building maintainable microservices. It covers infrastructure, continuous deployment, communication, event streaming and language choice.

A 1992 MIT Sloan talk and Q&A by Steve Jobs, then CEO of NeXT, covering NeXT's strategy, co-creating Apple, his ouster, and the value of direct experience. It ranges across technology, business and career advice.