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\title{Basics of Information Systems}
\author{Winter Semester 2022--23}
\date{For discussion on Wednesday, December 7, 2022}
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The following discussion points refer to the 2017 Turing award lecture
on June 4, 2018, by John Hennessy and David Patterson:
\begin{center}
\url{https://www.acm.org/hennessy-patterson-turing-lecture}
\end{center}
An edited version of the lecture is published as John L. Hennessy and
David A. Patterson, \textit{A new golden age for computer
architecture}, Commun.\ ACM \textbf{62}  (2019), 48--60,
\href{https://doi.org/10.1145/3282307}{\textsc{doi}: 10.1145/3282307}.

\begin{enumerate}
\item What are the crucial differences between RISC and CISC
instruction set architectures? 

\item What shift in technology, during the late 1970s, made RISC a
compelling alternative to the traditional and emerging CISC
architectures?

\item Why did the original excitement about RISC not translate into
market dominance?  On the contrary, why did the Intel x86
architecture, a CISC design, dominate the computing industry at least
until and into the 2010s?

\item What are the reasons for the comeback of RISC in recent years?

\item What shifts in technology and in the market provide, in the
opinion of the authors, opportunities which promise ``a new golden age
for computer architecture''?

\item The lecture is now about four years old.  Taking more recent
developments into account, would you subscribe to the authors' theses,
or do you consider them overly biased toward their own niche?

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