David Shippy Talk

The David Shippy talk in my last post was quite good; it featured a solid mix of business politics, and computer architecture, which drew a room-filling audience. That said, a LARGE portion of the audience was made up of EE280 students, who were apparently there in place of class. This is not a bad thing; conditioning the underclassmen to pay attention to seminars is an worthy goal. It also means the level of the talk was very well suited, if the audience had been a bunch of specialists on the topic (and a non-trivial portion of it was) it would have been inappropriately general, but for the spectrum of people in the room I would say it was pretty spot on.
I hung around afterwards, both to ask a question and because there were some very interesting conversations going on among the stragglers. As for the question, I wanted to know about the relationship of the PPC based Cell PPE and Xenon cores, to the things Nintendo uses…He was also in charge of the Gecko and Broadway chips that IBM makes for Nintendo to use in the GameCube and Wii respectively as well; and they share a common lineage but not a common design. Some of the straggler conversation was the expected material about computer architecture (especially historical stuff) which was informative, but there was one about engineering education that I found VERY interesting. I’m not sure that I should be quoting it, but suffice to say there are apparently solid numbers that confirm the suspicion that a high GPA (in high school or college) or SAT/ACT scores are not strongly correlated with success in EE/ECE programs at UK.
All in all, a cool talk, with lots of encouraging side factors.