Core Insights - David Patterson delivered a highly praised keynote speech at the RISC-V summit, reflecting on the birth of Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) at the University of California, Berkeley in 1981 [1][3] - The computing landscape in 1981 was dominated by mainframes and minicomputers, with IBM as the industry leader, and the VAX minicomputer representing the peak of technology at that time [1][2] - The prevailing belief was that Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) could bridge the "semantic gap" between high-level languages and hardware, but this was later proven to be inefficient [2][3] Summary by Sections Historical Context - In 1981, the computing environment was characterized by large machines, with the VAX being a 32-bit system running at 5 MHz and equipped with 2 KB cache [1] - The era also saw significant cultural events, including Ronald Reagan's presidency and the rise of disco music [1] RISC Principles - The RISC principles emerged from the realization that simpler instruction sets could lead to better performance, prioritizing fast clock cycles and easy decoding over the complexity of instruction sets [2][3] - Patterson compared CISC to an overly decorated 1950s Cadillac and RISC to a sleek, agile sports car, emphasizing the efficiency of simplicity [2] RISC-I Development - Patterson and student David Ditzel published a paper in 1980 that sparked widespread attention and debate regarding RISC versus CISC [3] - The RISC-I design was completed in under two years by a small group of students, demonstrating performance that was approximately twice as fast as the VAX, validating the RISC concept [3] Legacy and Impact - After 45 years, the simplicity and elegance of RISC have powered billions of devices globally and continue to thrive within the open RISC-V ecosystem [4]