5 ms·

I worked as a CPU architect at Intel for a decade. Never once did anyone solve an architecture problem the way Feynman did on CM-1. From wikipedia: "The engine

I worked as a CPU architect at Intel for a decade. Never once did anyone solve an architecture problem the way Feynman did on CM-1. From wikipedia: "The engineers had originally calculated that seven buffers per chip would be needed, but this made the chip slightly too large to build. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman had previously calculated that five buffers would be enough, using a differential equation involving the average number of 1 bits in an address." He determined the buffer size using a differential equation? Modern engineers would run trillions of simulation cycles of an RTL model and sweep the buffer size for thousands of workloads to find the inflection point, and present an Excel chart in a meeting. Then the design engineers would determine if there was enough die area to implement the buffer size, and even if there wasn't area but the performance was significant, they would have to implement it. Engineering now vs engineering then.

Banana699 5y ago
>Engineering now vs engineering then. Your post was great up until this. I don't like the 'Things were great in the past but look at us now' tone in general (doesn't mean it's not true in some cases), but also that's not what the historical incident shows : the "engineers then" were just as flabbergasted at Feynman's approach as anybody, and didn't trust the results. Feynman was a physicist, not an engineer. Differentials and integrals were his breakfast and dinner for ~50 years at the time. You and his colleagues at the CM team saw Outsider's Effect in action: where a talented individual, with a mind fresh of dogmas and established approaches, manage to repurpose the tools they practiced and honed in a different domain to engage and destroy a target in another domain from a highly unusual angle. Like startups, it doesn't always work. But when it works, it's fantastic.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  You read way too much into that. I never said A was better than B, you just assumed and then got on your soap box to lecture me. Also, I don't care what you like or if you think my post is great.
  - Banana699 5y ago
    >you just assumed and then got on your soap box to lecture me. You read way too much into that. A two-paragraph comment isn't a lecture buddy. >I don't care what you like or if you think my post is great. Mutual.
  - joeamroo 5y ago
    Please learn how to communicate probably.
- bsder 5y ago
  As much as I admire him, Feynman was also no stranger to "Proof By Intimidation." So, skepticism about his claims was always warranted if you couldn't follow them yourself. This is the difference between engineering and academia--abandoning an incorrect claim or assumption may carry a cost. If you are engineering something, someone might might actually hold you to your claims and start allocating money and resources. So, your claims had better be accurate. This is part of where the famous intransigence of engineers comes from. "Yes" and "No" are difficult answers. The world is full of "Maybe". Having the intuition from experience to pull the trigger even when the answer is "Maybe" is what makes you a high-level engineer.
  - gattilorenz 5y ago
    > Feynman was also no stranger to "Proof By Intimidation." So, skepticism about his claims was always warranted if you couldn't follow them yourself. Any specific example?
    - bsder 5y ago
      Mostly interviews with students or grand-students. However, I think Carver Mead also mentions this about "Collective Electrodynamics". Feynman got a lot of it right, but there were gaps and he simply bulldozed over people who poked at the gaps--sometimes because he believed it obviously true and sometimes because he wanted to dissuade people from working on something he was already working on himself. It's kind of a bad habit of lots of academics. Nobody has the time to understand the whole stack of things you stand on, so someone (generally junior) poking at something way down the stack is generally going to get brushed off with "That's obviously true". And, generally, that's fine. But, sometimes it's not and in engineering sometimes it has a cost. A vital part of engineering is communication. For example, I have calculated the resonant frequency of a microprocessor power grid using a Poynting vector formulation. It was very clever and very accurate, but completely indecipherable to most engineers. It was my job to correlate that with something that fellow engineers understood and trusted.

Banana699 5y ago

>Engineering now vs engineering then. Your post was great up until this. I don't like the 'Things were great in the past but look at us now' tone in general (doesn't mean it's not true in some cases), but also that's not what the historical incident shows : the "engineers then" were just as flabbergasted at Feynman's approach as anybody, and didn't trust the results. Feynman was a physicist, not an engineer. Differentials and integrals were his breakfast and dinner for ~50 years at the time. You and his colleagues at the CM team saw Outsider's Effect in action: where a talented individual, with a mind fresh of dogmas and established approaches, manage to repurpose the tools they practiced and honed in a different domain to engage and destroy a target in another domain from a highly unusual angle. Like startups, it doesn't always work. But when it works, it's fantastic.

SavantIdiot 5y ago
You read way too much into that. I never said A was better than B, you just assumed and then got on your soap box to lecture me. Also, I don't care what you like or if you think my post is great.
- Banana699 5y ago
  >you just assumed and then got on your soap box to lecture me. You read way too much into that. A two-paragraph comment isn't a lecture buddy. >I don't care what you like or if you think my post is great. Mutual.
- joeamroo 5y ago
  Please learn how to communicate probably.
bsder 5y ago
As much as I admire him, Feynman was also no stranger to "Proof By Intimidation." So, skepticism about his claims was always warranted if you couldn't follow them yourself. This is the difference between engineering and academia--abandoning an incorrect claim or assumption may carry a cost. If you are engineering something, someone might might actually hold you to your claims and start allocating money and resources. So, your claims had better be accurate. This is part of where the famous intransigence of engineers comes from. "Yes" and "No" are difficult answers. The world is full of "Maybe". Having the intuition from experience to pull the trigger even when the answer is "Maybe" is what makes you a high-level engineer.
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  > Feynman was also no stranger to "Proof By Intimidation." So, skepticism about his claims was always warranted if you couldn't follow them yourself. Any specific example?
  - bsder 5y ago
    Mostly interviews with students or grand-students. However, I think Carver Mead also mentions this about "Collective Electrodynamics". Feynman got a lot of it right, but there were gaps and he simply bulldozed over people who poked at the gaps--sometimes because he believed it obviously true and sometimes because he wanted to dissuade people from working on something he was already working on himself. It's kind of a bad habit of lots of academics. Nobody has the time to understand the whole stack of things you stand on, so someone (generally junior) poking at something way down the stack is generally going to get brushed off with "That's obviously true". And, generally, that's fine. But, sometimes it's not and in engineering sometimes it has a cost. A vital part of engineering is communication. For example, I have calculated the resonant frequency of a microprocessor power grid using a Poynting vector formulation. It was very clever and very accurate, but completely indecipherable to most engineers. It was my job to correlate that with something that fellow engineers understood and trusted.