The Great Debate @ARITH23: John Gustafson and William Kahan
dancefan1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2017-2023
4K views · 10 years ago · talk · evergreen
A 95-minute recorded debate at the ARITH23 computer arithmetic conference between John Gustafson, proponent of unums/posits, and William Kahan, architect of IEEE 754 floating point. They argue the merits of the new number formats versus conventional floats and interval arithmetic.
It is the go-to primary source whenever HN discusses posits versus IEEE floats, valued for Kahan's sharp critique despite the poor audio.
1:31:28Stanford Seminar: Beyond Floating Point: Next Generation Computer Arithmetic
Stanford Online
33K views • 9 years ago
9:16Floating Point Numbers - Computerphile
Computerphile
2.5M views • 12 years ago
55:02GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines
suckerpinch
391K views • 3 years ago
1:21:07David Patterson - A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture: History, Challenges and Opportunities
UBC Computer Science
99K views • 7 years ago
9:20An astonishing old calculator - Numberphile
Numberphile
794K views • 8 years ago
1:19:38John Hennessy and David Patterson 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award Lecture
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
150K views • 8 years ago
46:36Sophie Wilson - The Future of Microprocessors
Erlang Solutions
57K views • 9 years ago
20:08Fast Inverse Square Root — A Quake III Algorithm
Nemean
6M views • 5 years ago
14:46Robust-first computing: Beyond efficiency
Dave Ackley
8K views • 13 years ago
1:10:58Trends in Deep Learning Hardware: Bill Dally (NVIDIA)
Paul G. Allen School
32K views • 2 years ago
1:14:48The Future of Mathematics?
Microsoft Research
116K views • 7 years ago
31:06Jim Keller - Moore's Law in the age of AI Chips
Matroid
33K views • 6 years ago
32:08Tuesday @ 1130 ISA Shootout – a Comparison of RISC V, ARM, and x86 Chris Celio, UC Berkeley V2
RISC-V International
50K views • 10 years ago
1:00:34Chuck Moore's Fireside Chat 2011
GreenArraysInc
6K views • 14 years ago
19:08NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS
suckerpinch
314K views • 7 years ago
54:01Abseil's Open Source Hashtables: 2 Years In - Matt Kulukundis - CppCon 2019
CppCon
22K views • 7 years ago
40:13"Programming a 144-computer chip to minimize power" - Chuck Moore (2013)
Strange Loop Conference
19K views • 5 years ago
1:07:02Stanford Lecture: Don Knuth—"A Conjecture That Had To Be True" (2017)
Stanford Online
30K views • 8 years ago
1:04:53Jim Keller: Moore’s Law is Not Dead
UC Berkeley EECS
77K views • 7 years ago
7:42Extremely Large Numbers 1 - Introduction
Giroux Studios
20K views • 11 years ago
4 comments from Hacker News
A related discussion about number types: The Great Debate @ARITH23: John Gustafson and William Kahan ▶ this video Kahan points out disadvantages of interval maths.
Original posits are variable width, making them nearly useless for high performance parallel computations. Later versions don't add anything of use for low precision neural networks, and lack of hardware support anywhere make them too slow for anything other than toying around. See also link and ▶ this video
I did some reading on unum a while back, inc. Kahan's criticisms. There's another side. There's a vid on youtube with Kahan and Gustafson talking over it. Kahan goes in like a wolf onto a lamb, much to gustafson's shock and hurt. Gustafson points out some of Kahan's criticisms are plain wrong, even citing the page in the book, then says something like "we should be working together on this, why aren't we working together?" Kahan doesn't respond. Kahan may be right or wrong but his attitude is weirdly hostile, and Gustafson is no n00b about floats. Edit: I think this is it (but it's been a while) ▶ this video
The Great Debate @ARITH23: John Gustafson and William Kahan ▶ this video Audio quality is not great but there are links to slides from Gustafson and Kahan