Latency Lags Bandwidth

Authors:
Professor David Patterson
Affiliations:
University of California at Berkeley
Venue:
ICCD '05 Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Computer Design
Year:
2005

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Physical Database Design: the database professional's guide to exploiting indexes, views, storage, and more

Physical Database Design: the database professional's guide to exploiting indexes, views, storage, and more
Holistic design and caching in mobile computing

CODES+ISSS '08 Proceedings of the 6th IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/Software codesign and system synthesis

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Abstract

As I review performance trends, I am struck by a consistent theme across many technologies over many years: bandwidth improves much more quickly than latency for four different technologies: disks, networks, memories and processors. A rule of thumb to quantify the imbalance is: Bandwidth improves by more than the square of the improvement in latency. This talk lists a half-dozen performance milestones to document this observation, many reasons why it happens, a few ways to cope with it, and two small examples of how you might design systems differently if you kept this simple rule of thumb in mind.