AU Bite #9: Memorable Quotes

LAS VEGAS, NV (Autodesk University), Dec 3, 2009 - Here's some juicy lines heard at AU that simply must be revealed:

"The courts are fighting the last war"

Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, when asked about the effect of the decision of the Autodesk vs Vernor case, which went against Autodesk

"Only puny secrets need protection of patents. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."

Marshall McCluhan, quoted by Amory Lovins, RMI

“Like Chinese cooking, use everything. Eat the feet"

Singaporean engineer Eng Lock Lee who advocates benign design that uses resources effectively, quoted by Amory Lovins, RMI

"Man who waits for roast duck to fly into his mouth must wait a long time."

Chinese proverb, quoted by Amory Lovins, RMI

"If our heart was designed the way we design buildings, we would need a heart bigger than our bodies."

Amory Lovins, about our 1.5 Watt heart and the fluid losses tolerated in piping systems.

"You can have tomorrow's computer today"

Brain Matthews, head of Autodesk Labs, discussing how future computers will differ only by the number of computing cores, something he can currently duplicate with server farms. Previously, computing gains were made by increasing processing speed.

"The Internet is having a lot of impact"

Autodesk product manager, who shall remain nameless for his own protection.

Comments

[Evan Yares]

Scott:

Whether something is a commodity is mostly a matter of your perspective.

A single computer with a mult-core chip is closely coupled.

A server farm is loosely coupled.

Closely coupled architectures are ideal for desktop applications.

Loosely coupled architectures are ideal for cloud applications.

Is there crossover? Of course. But as application load is scaled, the differences start becoming critical.

[Scott Sheppard]

At a certain point all of those other computer aspects become commodities and are no longer differentiators. As a stretch of an analogy, when was the last time you bought a car based on its air conditioner? In 1967 that was an automotive selling feature. Now cars just come with air conditioners.

[Evan Yares]

"Brain Matthews, head of Autodesk Labs, discussing how future computers will differ only by the number of computing cores, something he can currently duplicate with server farms."

Wow. Did he totally ignore memory bandwith/channels, cache/memory coherency issues, and core/processor coupling?

Probably no big deal. For most purposes, what you can get from multiple cores is not that different from what you can get from a cluster.

But, to be picky, there's quite a bit of difference, architecturally, between a 48 core Intel SCC and an 8 core Intel Nehalem EX. It's not by any means only about the number of cores.

When companies such as Autodesk start actually delivering massively multi-threaded applications, the differences will start to become more important.