Jeff Dean
speaker
343 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 1 Aug
Jeff Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So I was doing a crazy thought experiment with some colleagues the other day about, you know, for 60 years, the whole silicon,
chip design industry, design and fabrication industry have done tremendous work to make smaller and smaller scale transistors that are very low error rate, right?
Like, because what the assumption that we want is that every chip we manufacture
of the same design should be identical to every other chip.
No bits should flip.
There's all kinds of things.
There's all kinds of error margins built into, you know, memories have ECC memory these days.
You know, at the macro scale, we don't make that assumption when we're building large scale distributed systems, right?
We build reliable large scale distributed file systems out of unreliable parts.
Right, like individual disks can fail, but your data should be safe.
And so we have mechanisms at a higher level to enable us to have
you know, three copies of the data on three different machines and three different racks so that if any rack switch or individual machine or disk fails, you still have your data.
We have Reed-Solomon encoding techniques, but we don't seem to do this at a really extreme level in the sort of transistor level scale of the technology we're working on.
So what would, basically an interesting thought experiment is what would happen if you tried to build a system
out of transistors that might have 20 errors per day, rather than one every million years.
That would be a very different design point and might enable you to do really interesting things in the fabrication side of things.
You'd have very different kind of design methodologies because if you want to get a signal from here to there and you have these super unreliable transistors, you might have very different ways of signaling.
You might send it along multiple redundant paths in order to make sure that it gets along one of them.
And I think that would be a pretty interesting set of thought experiments.
I'm not saying we should go do this, but you know, that's the kind of thing where you do want to, you know, occasionally question assumptions.
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