Quotes - Engineering

“If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?”

— Seymour Cray

  

"... AI won't replace people, but maybe people that use AI will replace people that don't."

 - Andrew Ng, 2024 

 

"My Favorite Programming Language is Solder."

- Steve Ciarcia

Also atrributed to Bob Pease, Terry Pratchett, and others 

  

"Every year there are 200,000 Chinese engineering graduates, and they don’t know what we know. We can solve problems they cannot.” 

- Robert A. Pease, Analog Circuits: World Class Designs, 2008

 

"... there's no patent on intellectual capability."

- Jim Williams, Interview with Bob Dobkin and Jim Williams April 19, 2006

Silicon Genesis: Oral Histories of Semiconductor Technology

 

"I may be the only person at an electronics flea market who will pay more for the busted stuff!"

- Jim Williams, The Importance of Fixing,  

The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design

"No one believes an analysis – except the person who did it.

Everyone believes a test – except the person who did it."

- ???

‘‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’’

 - Alan Kay

“Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.”

- Henry Petroski

"engineering ... is the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion."

- Arthur M. Wellingtony, The Economic Theory of the Location of Railways

"Engineer - the man who can do for a reasonable cost what another would expend a fortune on"

- Rutherford Aris, Vector, Tensors and the Basic Equations of Fluid Mechanics 

“In God we trust. All others bring data.”

- Bo Lojek, History of Semiconductor Engineering

"Research is when you don't know what you're doing."

- ??? 

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

 

The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren’t there.

- C. Gordon Bell

"When you test you find something is wrong."

- Donald Trump (May 14, 2020, about the COVID tests)

I would rather have a general who was lucky than one who was good.

- Napoleon Bonaparte

"Perfect is the Enemy of Good Enough"

- Eric Johns (October 1988), U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings: 37

“If an expert says something can be done he is probably correct, but if he says it is impossible then consider getting another opinion.”

- Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering 

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

- Alan Kay

The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. […] Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.

Brooks's Law: 

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

The Second-System:

    This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. 

 - Brooks, The Mythical Man Month

... this was going to be one of these Onion Syndrome deals - you peel off a couple layers, and cry; then you peel off a couple more layers, and cry some more.

- Bob Pease, What's All This Ground Noise Stuff, Anyhow?

Thinking is recommended. Heck, thinking is required.

- Bob Pease, Troubleshooting Analog Circuits

... a little known tenet of precision op amp circuits: Williams's Rule.  Williams's Rule is simple: always invert (except when you can't).

- Jim Williams, Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science, and Personalities

"Any idiot can count to ONE ..."

- Quoted by Samuel Wilensky in Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science, and Personalities

(maybe attributed to Bob Wildar)

Anyone can build a bridge that stands up, but only an engineer can build a bridge that just barely stands up.

- ????

"A user interface is like a joke – if you have to explain it, it's not that good."

- ????

 

In software, debugging is harder than writing code.  If you write the code as clever as you can, then you are not smart enough to debug it.

- ????

All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.

-????

... practicing what was called "the mushroom theory of management." ... defined it as follows: "Put 'em in the dark, feed 'em shit, and watch 'em grow."

- Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

Hardware eventually fails. Software eventually works.

-Michael Hartung

Quotes - Math and Science

 

"Even Hilbert had only a few tricks!"

- Gian-Carlo Rota, "Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught", 1997 

 

“Good, He did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician.” 

- David Hilbert, after learning that a student in his class had
dropped the subject in order to become a poet.

(David Darling, The Universal Book of Mathematics)  

 

"How can you do physics and poetry at the same time? The aim of science is to make difficult things understand able in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible." 

- Dirac once said to Oppenheimer

(Helge Kragh, "Dirac: A Scientific Biography")  

  

"A good building should not show its scaffolding when completed."

"No self-respecting architect leaves the scaffolding in place after completing his building."

- Gauss  

 

“There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories. Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.” 

- Freeman Dyson told Newsweek in 2002 

 

"If I had to choose one book to take to a desert island, I would take Zygmund’s Trigonometric Series if I thought I might be rescued, but Hardy and Wright’s Number Theory if I knew that I was never coming back." 

 - T.W.  Körner, Foreword to A Course of Pure Mathematics, 2008

  

"... true knowledge can only be acquired piecemeal, by the patient interrogation of nature."

- Edmund Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity

"The first time you go through the subject, you do not understand it at all. The second time, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time, you know that you do not understand it, but you are so used to the subject that it does not bother you anymore."

- Arnold Sommerfeld, about thermodynamics

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

- Ernest Rutherford

"those who can, do; those who can't, teach."

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

"Research is when you don't know what you're doing."

- ??? 

In real estate, it is location, location, location.  In mathematics, it is notation, notation, notation.

- ????

 

... where there is no confusion there is no prestige.

-Linderholm, Mathematics Made Difficult

Review of Computer Architecture Seventh Edition

 We had discussed the six editions of the authoritative text on computer architecture.  Eight years after the 6th edition, we have the 7th edition published in October 2025.  A quick scan of the table of content seems to show few new topics.  There is no large increase of page counts, only about 40 pages.  A third author is added. The famous processor performance chart is extended by a few years, but only to 2022 and the performance increases from 2015 is revised up to 9% a year (from 3.5%).  The top processor at 2017 is Intel Core i7 4.2GHz with performance score of 49,935, and at 2022 Intel Xeon E-2388G 3.2GHz with score 88,833.  Note the performance increase of 80% while the clock speed actually goes down (though the boost speed is a little higher).  The Moore's law seems to continue but performance increase has been significantly curtailed since 2004 when the Dennard's scaling law ended.

 What has been going on in this eight years?  The emergence of AI, represented by ChatGPT that made debut in 2022 is the most significant.  There is a mad dash to adopt AI in every industries and in everyday life.  And datacenters that support AI are being built in a such scale that causes shortage in chips and propels NVidia to one of the most valuable companies.  The vulnerability of computer architecture to malicious attack such as Meltdown and Spectre stunned computer architecture community.  The bedrock of the modern processor techniques of cache memory and speculative execution can be exploited.  The security issues are addressed in the new edition: side-channel attacks on the memory system and speculative and multithreading execution unit. With this the authors admonish the lack of adequate tools to address the security issues in processor design.

The chapter on warehouse-scale computing debuted in the fifth edition (2011) (as the book cover starts to show cloud).  The discussion always seems to me having been a little weak.  That situation has largely been remedied in this new edition.  But curiously, the concept of request-level parallelism, coined when the WSC was first introduced is merged into thread-level parallelism, as the cores become more numerous.

And the chapter on domain-specific architecture debuted in the sixth edition (2017) has shown significant improvements.

 Despite of many clever architectural innovation, the quantitative aspect of the computer design still seems naive.  The mathematical tools are so elementary (as in only elementary school arithmetic).  Perhaps we need to introduce more sophisticated tools or language to model computer architecture more precisely. Queuing theory was introduced briefly related to storage system.

 The realization of the similarities between vector processors and GPUs is significant. It bridges the two seemingly disparate concepts and allows a more uniform discussion, using the traditional language of computer architecture to discuss the GPUs which have evolved their own terminologies, unfamiliar to the outsiders.  As the GPUs break through the original 3D graphics accelerator to more general high-performance computing, that is especially suited for the AI processing.  And the GPUs have introduced low resolution float number computing unit particularly targeted the AI applications.