Preface
“It’s the Memory, Stupid!”
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
—John Cage
In 1996, Richard Sites, one of the fathers of computer architecture and lead designers of the DEC Alpha, had the following to say about the future of computer architecture research:
Across the industry, today’s chips are largely able to execute code faster than we can feed them with instructions and data. There are no longer performance bottlenecks in the floating-point multiplier or in having only a single integer unit. The real design action is in memory subsystems—caches, buses, bandwidth, and latency. ...
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