David Patterson

Patterson has said he was the first in his family to graduate from college; he majored in mathematics at UCLA intending to become an actuary, and in 1967, when a math course was canceled, he took a beginning Fortran class instead and was hooked on computers.⁠[1]

That year he married his high-school sweetheart, an award-winning teacher of acting improvisation who founded EAST BAY IMpRoV. The couple have two sons.⁠[2]

He received an AB in mathematics from UCLA in 1969, an MS in computer science in 1970, and a PhD in computer science in 1976.⁠[3]

Job hunting in the spring of 1976, he called Berkeley department chair Elwyn Berlekamp at the insistence of his wife, Linda, and went on to get an interview and a faculty offer; he recalled the salary as about $12,000 a year, and the couple decided to be “poor but proud.”⁠[1]

In 1980 he coined the term “reduced instruction set computer,” or RISC.⁠[4]

Patterson and Carlo Séquin started the RISC-I project in 1980 as assignments in graduate classes, with DARPA grant support; the student-designed processor had just 31 instructions, and the first chips arrived in the fall of 1981. The team sought no patents; on February 12, 2015, an IEEE Milestone plaque for the work was dedicated.⁠[5]

In 1982 his team demonstrated the RISC-I prototype, which with 44,000 transistors outperformed a CISC design using 100,000.⁠[6]

In 1988 he, Garth Gibson and Randy Katz presented the paper “A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID),” arguing that an array of inexpensive PC disks could outperform large mainframe drives; the RAID name catalyzed industry interest in the approach.⁠[7]

His textbook with Stanford’s John Hennessy, “Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach,” was published in 1990 and was the first to give a scientific framework for evaluating processor design.⁠[6]

Berkeley lists RISC, RAID and Networks of Workstations (NOW) as his best-known projects, each of which helped lead to billion-dollar industries.⁠[3]

He chaired Berkeley’s computer science division, ACM SIGARCH and the Computing Research Association, and was elected president of ACM for 2004 to 2006.⁠[2]

Intel and Microsoft announced a Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at Berkeley, directed by him and forming the basis of the Parallel Computing Laboratory (Par Lab); the companies expected to invest a combined $20 million in two university centers over five years. The same day ACM gave him its 2007 Distinguished Service Award.⁠[8]

In 2010 a summer project at Berkeley led by Krste Asanović and graduate students Andrew Waterman and Yunsup Lee, with pivotal support from Patterson, set out to find a suitable instruction set architecture; the result became the open RISC-V architecture.⁠[9]

He was a professor of computer science at Berkeley until 2016 and then became a professor of the graduate school and a distinguished engineer at GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry.⁠[4]

Speaking for Google at Stanford’s EE380 colloquium, he presented the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a custom chip deployed in Google datacenters since 2015 to accelerate deep neural networks, which was an order of magnitude faster than contemporary CPUs and GPUs.⁠[10]

ACM named him and John Hennessy recipients of the 2017 Turing Award for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to designing and evaluating computer architectures; the award carries a $1 million prize.⁠[6]

The RISC-V Foundation described him as vice chair of its board and an active member of the foundation.⁠[11]

With Hennessy he delivered the Turing Lecture, titled “A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture,” at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in Los Angeles, arguing that the field was on the cusp of another golden age.⁠[12]

He appeared on episode 104 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing RISC versus CISC, RISC-V, how machine learning changed computers, Moore’s law, RAID, teaching and wrestling.⁠[13]

He and Hennessy received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies. He recalled that they wrote their book out of “sheer frustration that there was nothing out there to help us teach our students.”⁠[14]

The National Academy of Engineering presented the Charles Stark Draper Prize to him, Hennessy, Stephen Furber and Sophie Wilson at a ceremony, for contributions to the invention, development and implementation of RISC chips.⁠[15]

He and Andy Konwinski presented the Berkeley lab model and the “Shaping AI” project at MIT CSAIL, proposing $1 million-plus inducement prizes and $10 million-plus five-year multidisciplinary research labs to improve AI’s impact.⁠[16]

Laude Institute, founded by Andy Konwinski, announced its launch with Patterson, Jeff Dean and Joelle Pineau on its board; its MoonshotsMoonshotsMoonshots, formally Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, is a technology podcast founded by Peter Diamandis. It discusses artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship and technological change, and launched its Moonshots LIVE gathering in Los Angeles in 2026.Open the full entry initiative grew out of the “Shaping AI” project he co-authored.⁠[17]

He is a Pardee professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, a Google Fellow and board chair of Laude Institute, having worked at Google for a decade; his textbook with Hennessy is in its 7th edition.⁠[18]

Personal website: Public link: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pattrsn/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

UC Berkeley: Official website: https://www.berkeley.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

Laude Institute: Official website: https://www.laude.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[17]