Brendan Gregg's Blog

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2021-07-05 14:30:03

It's an exciting time for developments in computer performance, not just for the BPF technology (which I often write about) but also for processors with 3D stacking and cloud vendor CPUs (e.g., AWS Graviton2); for memory with the arrival of DDR5 and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) on-processor; for storage including new uses for 3D Xpoint as a 3D NAND accelerator; for networking with the rise of QUIC and eXpress Data Path (XDP); and so on. I summarized these topics and more as a plenary conference talk, including my own predictions (as a senior performance engineer) for the future of computing performance, with a focus on back-end servers.

I work on many areas of performance, but recently I've had a lot of demand to talk about BPF. This was a chance to talk about other things I've been working on, such as the present and future of hardware performance. I also wrote about these topics in detail for my recent Systems Performance 2nd Edition book.

I've taken care to cite the author names along with the talk title and date, including for Internet sources, instead of the common practice of just listing URLs. I followed that practice when writing some earlier books, and it has since struck me as unfair that some references had author names and some didn't. Nowadays I always include names when known.