Dave Patterson and John Hennessy, two San Francisco Bay Area professors now associated with Google, have won the computing industry’s top prize for revolutionizing processors with a technology called RISC.
The pair won the 2017 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, a $1 million prize named after the British researcher who famously helped crack German Enigma codes in World War II and lay the foundations of computer science. The high-prestige award is considered the Nobel Prize for computer science.
RISC, short for reduced instruction set computing, gave a major performance boost to processors, fueled the growth of upstarts like Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems, and paved the way for today’s smartphone industry. It’s been a remarkable success over the last three decades, and one emblematic of the Silicon Valley ethos of throwing out the old way of doing things.
To read more, please visit: https://www.cnet.com/news/risc-chip-inventors-hennessy-patterson-win-computing-turing-prize/